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THE 

FITNESS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE 

FOR 

UNFOLDING THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF MEN. 

II. 

CHRIST THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS, 

OR, THE 

UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECIES OF HEATHENDOM. 

BEING 

THE HULSEAN LECTURES 

FOR MDCCCXLV. AND MDCCCXLVI. 



BY RICHARD CHENEVIX TREKCH, M.A., 

VICAR OP ITCHEN-STOKE, HANTS; PROFESSOR OF DIVINITY, KING'S COL- 
LEGE, LONDON; EXAMINING CHAPLAIN TO THE LORD BISHOP 
OF LONDON: AND LATE HULSEAN LECTURER. 



jfrom tf)t JStcairir 3Untom 




PHILADELP] 
H. HOOKER.— S. W. COR. EIGHTH AND CHESTNUT STS. 
185 4. 



ADVERTISEMENT. 



I have not felt myself at liberty to make 
more than a few verbal alterations, or here 
and there to recast a sentence, or add a 
clause, in these Lectures, on the occasion of 
their second appearance. I have inserted 
indeed a few brief passages, which, originally 
belonging to the Discourses, had been omitted 
in the delivery, and have to the Second Series 
appended a considerable number of Notes, in 
confirmation or illustration of statements made 
in the text. These having been asked for 
in more quarters than one, I trust may not 
be found unacceptable to some readers. 

Itohen-stoke, Nov. 19, 1847- 



CONTENTS, FOE THE YEAE 1845. 



LECTURE I. 

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 

Psalm CXIX. 18. 
Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out 

of thy law, 9 

LECTURE II. 

THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 
Ephesians I. 9, 10. 
Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according 
to his good pleasure, which he hath purposed in himself; 
that in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might 
gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are 
in heaven and which are on earth ; even in him, . . 24 

LECTURE III. 

THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 

Matthew XIV. 20. 

They did all eat and were filled, 39 

LECTURE IV. 

THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 
Hebrews I. 1, 2. 
God, who at sundry times and in divers manners, spake in time 
past unto the fathers, by the prophets, hath in these last 
days spoken unto us by his Son, . . . 57 

1* (5) 



6 CONTENTS. 

LECTURE V. 

THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 
John XII. 16. 
These things understood not his disciples at the first ; but when 
Jesus was glorified, then remembered they that these 
things were written of him, 72 

LECTURE YI. 

THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OP SCRIPTURE. 

Isaiah XII. 3. 

With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation, . 86 

LECTURE VII. 

THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 

Ezekiel XL VII. 9. 
And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which 

moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live, . 101 

LECTURE VIII. 

THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 

Revelations VI. 2. 

Conquering and to conquer, 115 



CONTENTS, FOE THE YEAR 1846. 



LECTURE I. 

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 

Haggai II. 7 

The Desire of all nations shall come, 131 

LECTURE II. 

THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 
Mark XVI. 3. 
Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the 

sepulchre ? . . 148 

LECTURE III. 

THE SON OF GOD. 

Acts XIV. 11. 
And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up 
their voices, saying, in the speech of Lycaonia, The gods 
are come down to us in the likeness of men, . . . 163 

LECTURE IY. 

THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 
Micah VI. 6, 7. 
Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself 
before the high God ? shall I come before him with burnt 
offerings ; with calves of a year old ? Will the Lord be 
pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of 
rivers of oil ? shall I give my first-born for my transgres- 
sion, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? . .177 

(J) 



8 CONTENTS. 

LECTURE V. 

THE RESTORER OF PARADISE. 
Genesis V. 29 
And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort 
us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of 
the ground which the Lord hath cursed, . . . .192 

LECTURE VI. 

THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 
Romans VII. 21-23. 
I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present 
with me. For I delight in the law of God after the in- 
ward man : but I see another law in my members, warring 
against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity 
to the law of sin which is in my members, . . . 205 

LECTURE YII. 

THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 
Hebrews XL 10. 
A city which hath foundations, whose builder and- maker is 

God, . .222 

LECTURE YIIL 

CONCLUDING LECTUEE. 

1 Thess. V. 21. 

Prove all things ; hold fast that which is good, . . . 238 



THE FITNESS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE 



FOR 



UNFOLDING THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF MEN. 



Psalm CXIX. 18. 

Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law. 

It was with a true insight into the sad yet needful con- 
ditions of the Truth militant in a world of error, that he 
who has of such just title given his name to these Lectures, 
which I am now permitted to deliver in this place, devoted 
so largely of his temporal means to the securing among us 
a succession of discourses, having more or less nearly to do 
with the establishing and vindicating of that Truth against 
all gainsayers and opposers. For such apologies of our 
holy Faith as he desired by this and other kindred founda- 
tions of which he was the author, to promote and set for- 
ward, are deeply grounded in the very nature of the Faith 
itself — and this, whether they be defensive or aggressive, 
whether they be of the Truth clearing itself from unjust 
aspersions, or carrying the war, as it must 'often do, into the 
quarters of error, and proving itself not merely to be true, 
but to be Truth absolute, to the exclusion of all rival claims. 
We know, as a matter of history, that Christian literature 
did begin, as far back as we can trace it, with works of this 
character ; they are among the earliest which have reached 
us; probably among the earliest which existed. Nor do 

(9) 



10 LECTURE I. 

they belong merely to the first ages of the Church's being, 
however in them they may naturally have had a special im- 
portance. The Truth, like Him who gave it, will always 
be a sign which shall be spoken against. The forms of the 
enmity may change ; the coarser and more brutal accusa- 
tions of one age may give place to subtler charges of another; 
but so long as an ungodly world exists, the enmity itself 
will remain, and will find utterance. The Truth, therefore, 
must ever be succinct, and prompt to give an answer for 
itself; and this it does the more readily, as knowing that 
not man's glory, but God's glory is at hazard, when it is 
assailed ; as being infinitely removed from that pride which 
might tempt to the keeping silence, because it knows that 
the accusations made against it are unjust; being rather full 
of that humility and love, which make it willingly conde- 
scend to the most wayward, if haply it may win them to 
the service of its King. 

And this is not all : the Truth cannot pause when it 
has thus refuted and thrown back the things that it knew 
not, which yet were laid to its charge. In its very nature 
it is aggressive also. How should it not be so ? how should 
it not make war on the strongholds of falsehood and error, 
when its very task in the world is to deliver them that were 
prisoners there ? how should it not seek to gather men 
under its banner, — being moved, as it ever is, with an in- 
ward bleeding compassion for all them that are aliens from 
the faith of Christ, as knowing that every man, till he has 
found himself in Him, is estranged from the true home of 
his spirit, the right centre of his being ? How should it 
not press its treasures upon each, commend its medicines to 
all, when they are medicines for every man's hurt, treasures 
which would make every man rich ? when it knows that it 
has the reality, of which every lie is the counterfeit; that 
when men are the fiercest set against it, then are they the 
most madly at strife with their own blessedness?* 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 11 

But this, it might be said, would sufficiently explain the 
uses of Christian apology before a world which resists, or 
puts by, the Faith ; it would explain why the Truth should 
count itself happy to stand, as it did once in the person of 
Paul, before Festus and Agrippa, and in presence of Gentile 
and Jew, to make answer for itself. But allowing this, 
what means it when before a congregation of faithful men, 
when at one of the great centres of Christian light and 
knowledge in our own land, a preacher undertakes, and 
that at large and from year to year, the handling some 
point of the evidences of our Religion? Might not this 
seem at first as superfluous a form, as when, upon a day of 
coronation, a champion rides forth, and with none but loyal 
hearts beating in unison with the multitudinous voices 
which have hailed his king and theirs, flings down his 
glove, and challenges any that will gainsay the monarch's 
right to the crown which has just been set upon his brows? 
Our task might indeed be superfluous as this, were its only 
purpose to convince opposers. There is blessed be God, a 
foregone conclusion in the minds of the faithful, drawn from 
all which they have known themselves of the life and 
power of the Truth, which suffers them not for an instant to 
regard it as something yet in debate, and still to be proved ; 
since it has already approved itself in power and blessing 
unto them. 

And yet even for them a work of Christian apology may 
be so constructed as to have its worth and meaning. If it 
widen the basis on which their Faith reposes, if it help 
them to take count of and use treasures, which before they 
had, but which they knew not before save in part ; if it 
cause them to pass from belief to insight ; if it bring out 
for them the perfect proportions of the Truth, its singular 
adaptations to the pre-established harmonies of the world, 
as they had not perceived these before \ if it furnish them 
with a clue for guiding some perplexed and wandering 



12 LECTURE I. 

brother from his dreary labyrinth of doubt and error — if in 
any of these ways it effectually serve, surely it has not been 
in vain. Such uses we acknowledge in Evidences of our 
Faith, when we constitute them a part of our discipline in 
this University ; which assuredly we do, not as presuming 
that we have to deal with any who are yet aliens from that 
Faith, who have yet need to be brought to the acknowledg- 
ing of the truth as it is in Jesus ; but rather as desiring to 
put them who already have drawn in their faith, and that 
from better sources, from the lips of their mothers, from the 
catechisms of their childhood, from among the sanctities of 
their home, in possession of the scientific grounds of that 
belief, which already, by a better and more immediate 
tenure, is theirs. 

Nor may we leave wholly out of sight that in a time like 
our own, of great spiritual agitation, at a place like this, of 
signal intellectual activity, where oftentimes the low mutter- 
ings of distant controversies, scarcely heard elsewhere, are 
distinctly audible — there can hardly fail to be some per- 
plexed with difficulties, harassed, it may be, with doubts 
which they do not welcome, but would give worlds to be 
rid of for ever — doubts which, perhaps, the very precious- 
ness of the Truth in their sight alone magnifies into import- 
ance ; for they feel that they are going to hang upon that 
Truth all that is dear to them for life and for eternity ; that it 
must be to them as their spirit's bride; and therefore they 
cannot endure upon it the faintest breath of suspicion. I 
say, brethren, that we may not leave wholly out of mind 
that one and another in such perplexity of spirit may be 
among us here. Happy above measure he who has " a mouth 
and wisdom" given him to meet the necessities of such an 
one among his brethren ; who shall help to bring him into 
the secure haven of belief, into the confession that in Christ 
Jesus are indeed laid up " all," and those infinite " treasures 
of wisdom and knowledge." 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 13 

But if discourses of the kind which I am commencing 
to-day, are indeed to be profit to any, there appear to be one 
or two preliminary conditions in the choice of a subject, 
most needful to be observed ,• which failing to observe, we 
shall, of sure' consequence, fall wholly short of those ends 
of usefulness which we desire. 

And first, a work of Christian defence will be marred, if 
the subject which we select be one upon which none of the 
great and decisive issues of the mighty conflict between 
Truth and error depend; as when in jousts and tournaments 
a knight touches the shield of some feeble adversary, passing 
by and leaving the stronger and more accomplished unchal- 
lenged. For thus it is with us, when we go off upon some 
minor point, which even were it plainly won, would leave 
us in no essential degree the better, nor an adversary the 
worse ; which he might yield without being dislodged from 
his strongholds of unbelief, without even feeling them less 
tenable than before. 

Or again, it will be to little profit that we deal with hin- 
derances to men's belief, which once indeed were real and 
urgent, but of which the urgency and reality have long 
since departed; if we take our stand in some part of the 
battle-field from which the great turmoil of the conflict has 
now ebbed and shifted away; or conjure up phantom forms 
of opposition, which once indeed were living and strong, 
but now survive only in the tradition of books, and at this 
day practically weaken no man's faith, disturb no man's 
inner peace. This, too, were a fatal error, to have failed to 
take note of that great stream of tendency, which has 
borne us amid other shoals, and near other rocks, from those 
among which our forefathers steered with manful hearts the 
bark of their faith, and of God's great mercy made not 
shipwreck of that faith amidst them all. 

Or, once more, Christian apology fails in its loftiest aim, 
when it addresses, not the whole man, but the man only 

2 



14 LECTURE I. 

upon one side, and that not the highest, of his being; when 
it addresses, not the conscience, the affections, the will, but 
the understanding faculties alone. How often do we meet 
in books of Christian evidence the attempt made to substi- 
tute a logical or mathematical proof of our most holy Faith 
for a moral one ; to ascend to that proof by steps which can 
no more be denied than the successive steps in a problem in 
geometry, and so to drive an adversary into a corner from 
whence there shall be no escape. But there is always an 
escape for those that in heart and will are alienated from 
the truth. At some stage or other of the process they will 
successfully break away, or even if they are brought to the 
end, they remain not with us long. And we may thank 
God that it is so ; for it is part of the glory of the Truth 
that it leads in procession no chained, no unwilling captives 
— none that do not rejoice in their captivity, and share in the 
triumph which they adorn. It is not therefore that arguments 
which address themselves to lower parts of man's being than 
the highest, are to be rejected — but only their insufficiency 
acknowledged ; that they of themselves will never introduce 
any to the inner sanctuary of the Faith ; but can only lead 
him up to the doors. Most needful are they in their place ; 
most needful that Christianity should approve itself to have 
a true historic foundation ; that as a fact in history it should 
stand as rigid a criticism as any other fact; that the books 
which profess to tell its story should vindicate for them- 
selves an authentic character; that the men who wrote 
those books should be shown capable and credible witnesses 
of the things which they deliver; that the outworks of our 
Faith should be seen to be no less defensible than its citadel. 
But, after all, the heart of the matter is not there ; when all 
is done, men will feel in the deepest centre of their being 
that it is the moral which must prove the historic, and not 
the historic which can ever prove the moral ; that evidences 
drawn from without may be accepted as the welcome but- 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 15 

tresses, but that we can know no other foundations, of our 
Faith than those which itself supplies. Revelation, like the 
sun, must be seen by its own light ; being itself the highest, 
the ultimate appeal with regard to it cannot lie with any- 
lower than itself. There was indeed a sense in which Christ 
received the witness of John, but there was another in 
which He received not witness of any man, only his own 
witness and his Father's. Even so is it with his Word and 
his doctrine. There is a witness which they can receive of 
men ; there is also a witness which no other can yield them 
than themselves. 

I trust, then, that taking for my argument The fitness of 
Holy Scripture for unfolding the spiritual life of men, and 
finding in its adaptations for this a proof of its divine 
origin, I shall not fail in these primary conditions, how- 
ever immeasurably I shall of necessity fall below the great- 
ness and grandeur of my theme. 

For first, this question, Whether Scripture be not a book 
capable of doing, and appointed to do, an higher work than 
every other book, cannot be regarded as one which is not 
vital. It is felt to be vital by all those whose aim and pur- 
pose is to prove that it is but a book as other books, and 
therefore underlying the same weakness and incompletenesses 
as every other work of men's hands. And these are many ; 
since for one direct assault on Christianity as a delivered 
fact, there are twenty on the records of Christianity, or the 
manner of its delivery. Many a one who would not ven- 
ture boldly to enter on the central question, whether the 
Christ whom the Church believes, whom not any one pas- 
sage alone, but the collective sum of the Scriptures has 
delivered to us, be not the highest conceivable revelation 
of the Invisible God, and his Incarnation the necessary out- 
coming of the perfections of the Godhead, will yet hover on 
the outskirts of the conflict, and set himself to the detecting,, 



16 LECTURE I. 

as he hopes, a flaw in this narration, or to the proving the 
historic evidence for that book insufficient. They who pass 
by the consideration as one which never rose up before their 
minds, whether there has not been a great education of our 
race, reaching through all ages, going forward from the day 
that God called Abraham from among his fathers' idols; 
and whether this great idea be not as a golden thread, run- 
ning through the whole woof and tissue of Scripture — they 
who shun altogether considerations such as these, will yet 
set themselves diligently to look for petty discrepancies 
between one historic book and another, or for proofs which 
shall not be put by, of some later hand than that of Moses 
in some notice in the book of G-enesis. And however paltry 
and petty this warfare may be, it is no doubt a true instinct 
of hate which makes them hope to discover vulnerable points 
in Scripture, as knowing that could they really find such, 
through them they might effectually wound Him, of whom 
the Scripture is the outcoming and the Word. 

Nor, again, can it be said that this is a matter, which 
though once brought into earnest debate, is now so no more ; 
or that the earnestness of the struggle has been now trans- 
ferred to other parts of the great controversy between the 
kingdoms of light and of darkness. It is not so : the 
Porphyrys, the Celsuses, and the Julians of an earlier age, 
have never wanted their apt scholars, their worthy successors. 
The mantle of the false prophet is as surely dropped and 
bequeathed, as the mantle of the true. Who that knows 
aught of what is going forward among a people, who not in 
blood only, but in much besides, are most akin to us of all 
the nations of Europe, will deny that even now God's Word 
is tried to the uttermost; that it still has need to make 
good its claims ; or knowing this, will presume to say how 
soon we may not find ourselves in the midst of controversies, 
which assuredly have not yet run themselves out, nor by 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 17 

the complete victory of the Truth brought themselves to a 
quiet end ? 

Nor shall we with this theme be lingering about the outer 
precincts of our Faith. Not the external authority with 
which these books come to us, but the inner seal with which 
they are sealed, the way in which, like Him of whom they 
testify, they receive not witness of men, but by all which 
they are, by all which they have wrought, bear witness of 
themselves that they are of God, even the witness of power, 
this is our high argument. 

And to it perhaps there will be no fitter introduction than 
a few general remarks on the connexion in which a book 
may stand to the intellectual and spiritual life of men. 
And would we appreciate the importance of a book received 
as absolute law, for the mental and moral culture of those 
who in such wise receive it, the influences which it will exert 
in moulding them, if only that book contain any elements 
of truth ', let us consider for an instant what the Koran has 
been and is to the whole Mohammedan world ; how it is 
practically the great bond and band of the nations profess- 
ing that spurious faith, holding fast in a community, which 
is a counterpart, however feeble, of a Christendom, nations 
whom every thing else would have tended to separate ; how 
it has stamped on them the features of a common life, and 
set them however immeasurably below the Christian 
nations, yet well nigh as greatly above all other nations 
of the world ; — let us consider this, and then what the book 
is that has wrought the mighty effects — the many elements 
of fraud and folly which are mixed up with, and which 
weaken, the truth which it possesses ; and then let us ask 
ourselves what by comparison must be a Bible, or Scripture 
of absolute truth, to the Christian world ! 

Or to estimate the shaping moulding power which may 
lie in books, even when they come not as revelations, real 
or pretended, of the will of God, let us attempt to measure 

2* 



18 LECTURE I. 

the influence which a few Greek and Latin books, (for the 
real effective books are but few,) exert and have exerted on 
the minds of men, since the time they have been familiarly 
known and studied; the manner in which they have modi- 
fied the habits of thought, coloured the language, and affected 
the whole institutions of the world in which we live ; how 
they have given to those who have sedulously occupied them- 
selves isa their study and drunk in their spirit, a culture and 
tone of mind recognisably different from that of any other 
men; and this, although they come with the seal of no 
absolute authority; although, on the contrary, we feel that 
on many points (and some of these the very chiefest) we 
stand greatly above them. Let us take this into account, 
and we shall allow that it is scarcely possible to overrate 
the influence of a book which does come with highest sanc- 
tion, to which men bow as containing the express image of 
the Truth, and which is, as those are, only for a longer 
period and in a higher region of the spiritual life, the ap- 
pointed instrument for calling out the true humanity in 
every man. 

At first, indeed, it seems hard to understand how any 
written word should possess such influence as that which we 
attribute to this ; diflicult to set a dispensation of the Truth 
in that form at all upon a level in force and influence with 
the same Truth, when it is the living utterance of living 
men, or to ascribe to it powers at all equal to theirs. But 
when we consider more closely, the wonder disappears ; we 
soon perceive how, by the Providence of God, a written 
word, be it of man's truth or of God's Truth, should have 
been charged with such important functions to fulfil. For 
first, it is plain that the existence of a written word is the 
necessary condition of any historic life or progress whatso- 
ever in the world. If succeeding generations are to inherit 
aught from those that went before, and not each to begin 
anew from first rudiments, — if all is not to be always childhood 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 19 

— if there is to be any manhood of our race, — it is plain that 
only thus, only through such an instrument could this be 
brought about. 

And most of all it is evident that through a Scripture 
alone, that is, through a written record, could any great epoch, 
and least of all an epoch in which great spiritual truths were re- 
vealed or reasserted, transmit itself unimpaired to the after 
world. For every new has for a long while an old to contend 
with, every higher a lower, which is continually seeking to draw 
it down to itself. The most earnest oral tradition will in a little 
while lose its distinctness, undergo essential though insen- 
sible modifications. Apart from all desire to vitiate the 
committed word, yet, little by little, the subjective condi- 
tion of those to whom it is intrusted, through whom it 
passes, will infallibly make itself felt ; and in such treache- 
rous keeping is all which remains merely in the memories 
of men, that after a very little while, rival schools of disci- 
ples begin to contend not merely how their master's words 
were to be accepted, but what those very words were them- 
selves. 

Moreover it is only by recurrence to such witnesses as 
are thus secured for the form in which the Truth was at the 
first delivered, that any great restoration or reformation can 
proceed; only so can that which is grown old renew its 
youth, and cast off the slough of age. Without this, all 
that is once let go would be irrecoverably gone — all once 
lost would be lost forever. Without this, all that did not 
interest at the moment, all which was laid deep for the 
uses of a remote posterity, of which they were first to dis- 
cover the price and value, would long before it reached 
them have inevitably perished. And when the Church of 
the Apostolic age, with that directly following, is pointed to 
as an exception to this general rule, — as a Church existing 
without a Scripture, — even as no doubt for some while the 
Church did exist with a canOn not full formed, but forming, 



20 LECTURE I. 

and for a little while without any Scriptures peculiarly its 
own, is left out of sight that the question is not, whether a 
Church could so exist, "but whether it could subsist — not 
whether it could be, but whether it could continue to be. 
That for a while, under rare combinations of favourable 
circumstances, with living witnesses and fresh memories of 
the Lord's life and death in the midst of it, a Christian 
Church without any actual writings of its new Covenant 
could have existed, is one thing ; and another, whether it 
could so have survived through long ages 3 whether without 
them it could have kept ever before its eyes any clear and 
distinct image of Him that was its founder, or stamped any 
lively impress of Him on the hearts of its children. No ; 
it is assuredly no happy accident of the Church that it 
possesses a Scripture ; but if the wonders of the Church's 
first becoming were not to repeat themselves continually, 
if it was at all to know a natural evolution in the world ; 
then, as far as we can see, this was a necessary condition of 
its very subsistence. 

This, then, brethren, will be the aim of these Lectures 
which I am about to deliver in your hearing. I shall 
desire reverently, and with God's grace assisting, to discover 
what I may, of the inner structure of this Book which is so 
essential a factor in the spiritual life of men — humbly to 
trace where I can, the wisdom with which it is laid out to 
be the nourisher and teacher of all men, and of all men in 
all ages and in all parts of their complex being ; also to 
show, where I am able, how it has effectually approved 
itself as such. 

And yet, brethren, such considerations may not be entered 
on without one or two needful cautions, which I should wish to 
keep ever before myself, which I should wish to commend also 
to you. And first, let us beware lest contemplating this 
goodly fabric, we be contemplators only; as though we 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 21 

were to stand without Scripture and admire it, and not to 
stand within it and obey it. That were a mournful self- 
deceit — to see and marvel at its fitness for every man, and 
never to have made proof of that fitness for the needs of one 
heart, for the healing the deep wound of one spirit, even of 
our own. And, indeed, only in this way of love and of 
obedience shall we enter truly into any of the hidden 
riches which it contains ; for that only which we love, we 
know. No book, much less the highest, yields its secrets, 
reveals its wonders, to any but the reverent, the loving, and 
the humble. To other than these, the door of higher under- 
standing is ever closed. We must pass into and unite our- 
selves with that which we would know, ere we can know it 
more than in name. 

And then, brethren, again, when we propose to consider 
the structure of Scripture, it is not as though this were 
needed before men could enter into its fullest and freest 
enjoyment. It is far from being thus ; for as a man may 
live in an house without being an architect, so may we 
habitually live and move in Holy Scripture, without con- 
sciously, by any reflex act, being aware of any one of the 
wonders of its construction, the secret sources of its strength 
and power. To know simply that it is the Word of Grod 
has sufficed thousands and tens of thousands of our brethren ; 
even as, no doubt, in this one affirmation is gathered up and 
anticipated all that the most earnest and devout search may 
unfold. We may say this, that it is Grod's Word, in other 
language, we may say this more at large, yet more than 
this we cannot say ; after the widest range we shall only 
return to this at the last. 

But while this is true, it remains true also that " the 
works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that 
have pleasure therein," if only leisure and opportunities are 
theirs — that if love is the way of knowledge, knowledge also 
is the food of love, the appointed fuel of the sacred fire; 



22 LECTURE I. 

that, if the affections are to be kept lastingly true to an 
object, the reasonable faculties, supposing them to have 
been actively called out, must find also in that object their 
satisfying employment. Many among us here have, or will 
have, not merely to live on G-od's Word ourselves, but, as 
our peculiar task, to unfold its secrets and bring forth its 
treasures for others. We therefore cannot draw from it 
that unconscious nutriment which do many. Whatever 
may be the danger of losing the simplicity of our love for it, 
and coming to set that love up on other grounds than those on 
which the love of the humblest and simplest of our brethren 
reposes, and so of separating themselves in spirit from him ; 
this, like any other danger of our spiritual life, must not be 
shrunk from, by shrinking from the duty to which, like its 
dark shadow, it cleaves; but in other and more manful 
ways must be met and overcome. We all of us have need, 
if not all from our peculiar functions, yet all from our posi- 
tion as the highest educated of our age and nation, as there- 
fore the appointed leaders of its thoughts and feelings, not 
merely to prize and honour this Book, but to justify the 
price and honour, in which we hold it ourselves, in which 
we bid others to hold it. 

May some of us be led by what shall be here spoken 
to a fuller recognition of those treasures of wisdom and 
knowledge which are or may be, day by day, in our hands. 
May we be reminded of the high privilege which it is to 
have a book which is also, as its name declares, the Book ; 
which stands up in the midst of its brethren, the kingly 
sheaf, to which all the others do obeisance (Gren. xxxvii. 7 ;) 
— not casting a slight upon them, but lending to them 
some of its own dignity and honour. May we in a troubled 
time be helped to feel something of the grandeur of the 
Scripture, and so of the manifold wisdom of that Eternal 
Spirit by whom it came — and then petty objections 
and isolated difficulties, though they were multiplied 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 23 

as the sands of the sea, will not harass us. For what 
are they all to the fact, (I am here using and concluding 
with words far better than my own,) that " for more than a 
thousand years the Bible collectively taken has gone hand 
in hand with civilization, science, law, — in short with the 
moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always 
supporting, and often leading the way ? Its very presence 
as a believed book has rendered the nations emphatically a 
chosen race, and this too in exact proportion as it is more or 
less generally studied. Of those nations which in the 
highest degree enjoy its influences, it is not too much to 
affirm that the differences, public and private, physical, 
moral and intellectual, are only less than what might be 
expected from a diversity in species. Good and holy men, 
and the best and wisest of mankind, the kingly spirits of 
history enthroned in the hearts of mighty nations, have 
borne witness to its influences, have declared it to be beyond 
compare the most perfect instrument, the only adequate 
organ, of humanity ) the organ and instrument of all the 
gifts, powers, and tendencies, by which the individual is 
privileged to rise above himself, to leave behind and lose his 
dividual phantom self, in order to find his true self in that 
distinctness where no division can be, — in the Eternal I AM, 
the ever-living Word, of whom all the elect, from the 
archangel before the throne to the poor wrestler with the 
Spirit until the breaking of day, are but the fainter and 
still fainter echoes." 



LECTURE II. 

THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 

Ephesians I. 9, 10. 

Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his 
good pleasure, which he hath purposed in himself; that in the dispen- 
sation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things 
in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth; even 
in him. 

It is the necessary condition of a book which shall exert 
any great and effectual influence, which shall stamp itself with 
a deep impression upon the minds and hearts of men, that 
it must have a unity of purpose : one great idea must run 
through it all. There must be some single point in which 
all its different rays converge and meet. The common eye 
may fail to detect the unity, even while it unconsciously owns 
its power ; yet this is necessary still ; this growing out of a 
single root, this subordination of all the parts to a single 
aim, this returning of the end upon the beginning. We 
feel this in a lower sphere ; nothing pleases much or long, 
nothing takes greatly hold, no work of human genius or 
art, which is not at one with itself, which has not form, in 
the highest sense of that word ; which does not exclude and 
include. And it is hardly necessary to add, that if the 
effects are to be deep and strong, this idea must be a great 
one : it must not be one which shall play lightly upon the 
surface of their mind3 that apprehend it, but rather one 
which shall reach far down to the dark foundations out of 
sight upon which reposes this awful being of ours. 

Now what I should desire to make the subject of my lec- 
ture to-day is exactly this, that there is one idea in Holy 
(24) 



THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 25 

Scripture, and tbis idea the very highest; that all in it 
is referable to this ; that it has the unity of which I spake ; 
that a guiding hand and spirit is traceable throughout, in- 
cluding in it all which bears upon one mighty purpose, ex- 
cluding all which has no connexion with that, — however, 
from faulty or insufficient views, we might have expected it 
there ; however certainly it would have intruded itself there, 
had this been a work of no higher than human skill. I 
would desire to show that it fulfils this condition, the neces- 
sary condition of a book which shall be mighty in operation ; 
that it is this organic whole, informed by this one idea ; — 
how this one explains what it has and what it has not ; much 
in its form, and yet more in its substance ; why it should 
be brief here, and large there ; why it omits wholly this, 
and only touches slightly upon that ; why vast gaps, as at 
first sight might seem to us, occur in some portions of it; 
infinite minuteness of detail in others; how things which 
at first we looked to find in it, we do not find, and others, 
which we were not prepared for are there. 

And this unity if it can be shown to exist, none can 
reply that it was involved and implied in the external acci- 
dents of the Book, and that we have mistaken the outward 
aggregation of things similar for the inward coherence of 
an organic body : since these accidents, if the word may be 
permitted, are all such as would have created a sense of di- 
versity ; and it is only by penetrating through them, and 
not suffering them to mislead us, that we do attain to the 
deeper and pervading unity of Scripture. Its unity is not, 
for instance, that apparent one which might be produced by 
a language common to all its parts. For it is scarcely pos- 
sible, I suppose, for a deeper gulf to divide two languages 
than divides the two in which severally the Old and the 
New Testament are written. Nor can it be likeness of 
form which has deceived us into believing that unity of 
spirit exists; for the forms are various and diverse as can be 

3 



26 LECTURE II. 

conceived; it is now song, now history; now dialogue, now 
narration ; now familiar letter, now prophetic vision. There 
is scarcely a form of composition in which men have clothed 
their thoughts and embodied their emotions which does not 
find its archetype here. Nor yet is the unity of this volume 
brought about through all the parts of its being the up- 
growth of a single age, and so all breathing alike the spirit 
of that age; for no single age beheld the birth of this 
Book, which was well nigh two thousand years ere it was 
fully formed and had reached its final completion. Nor can 
its unity, if it exists, be accounted for from its having had 
but one class of men for its human authors ; since men not 
of one class alone, but of many, and those the widest apart, 
kings and herdsmen, warriors and fishermen, wise men and 
simple, have alike brought their one stone or more, and been 
permitted to build them in to this august dome and temple 
which God through so many ages was rearing to its glorious 
height. Deeper than all its outward circumstances, sin3e 
these all would have tended to an opposite result, this unity 
must lie — in the all-enfolding seed out of which the whole 
book is evolved. 

But this unity of Scripture, where is it ? from what point 
shall we behold and recognise it? Surely from that in 
which those verses which I have taken from the Epistle to 
the Ephesians will place us ; when we regard it as the story 
of the knitting anew the broken relations between the Lord 
God and the race of man ; of the bringing the First-begotten 
into the world, for the gathering together all the scattered 
and the sundered in Him; when we regard it. as the true 
paradise Regained — the true De Civitate Dei, — even by a 
better title than those noble books which bear these names 
— the record of that mystery of God's will which was work- 
ing from the first, to the end " that in the dispensation of 
the fulness of times He might gather together in one all 
things in Christ." 



THE. UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 27 

And all nearer examination will show how true it is to this 
idea, which we affirm to lie at its ground. It is the story 
of the divine relations of men, of the divine life which, in 
consequence of those still subsisting relations, was strug- 
gling to the birth with more or less successful issues in 
every faithful man ; which came perfectly to the birth in 
the One, even in Him in whom those relations were consti- 
tuted at the first, and perfectly sealed ah the last. It is the 
story of this, and of nothing else ; the record of the men 
who were conscious of a bond between earth and heaven? 
and not only dimly conscious, for that all people who have 
not sunk into savage hordes have been, but who recognized 
these relations, this fellowship, as the great undoubted fact 
with which God had underlaid their life — the support not 
merely of their personal being, but as that which must sus- 
tain the whole society of earth — whether the narrower so- 
ciety of the Family, or the wider of the State, or the all- 
embracing one of the Church. 

How many temptations there were to wander out of and 
beyond this region, which yet every one of us must recog- 
nise at once to be the true region in which only an Holy 
Scripture should move \ how many other regions in which 
had it been other than what it is, it might have lost itself? 
For instance, other so called sacred books almost invariably 
miss the distinction between ethics and physics, lose them- 
selves in theories of creation, endless cosmogonies, subtle 
speculations about the origin of the material universe. Such 
a deep ground has this error, so willing are men to substi- 
tute the speculative for the practical, and to lose the last in 
the first, that we find even after the Christian Faith had 
been given, a vast attempt to turn even that into a philo- 
sophy of nature. What, for example, was Manicheism, 
but the attempt to array a philosophy of nature in a Chris- 
tian language, to empty Christian truths of all their ethical 
worth, and then to use them as a gorgeous symbolic garb for 



28 LECTURE II. 

clothing a system different to its very core ? But Scripture 
is no story of the material universe.* A single chapter is 
sufficient to tell us that " God made the heavens and the 
earth." Man is the central figure there, or to speak more 
truly, the only figure ; all which is there besides serves but 
as a background for him ; he is not one part of the furni- 
ture of this planet, not the highest merely in the scale of 
its creatures, but the lord of all — sun and moon and stars, 
and all the visible creation, borrowing all their worth and 
their significance from the relations wherein they stand to 
him. Such he appears there in the ideal worth of his 
unfallen condition; and even now, when only a broken 
fragment of the sceptre with which once he ruled the 
world, remains in his hand, such he is commanded to regard 
himself still. 

It is one of Spinoza's charges against Scripture, that it 
does erect and recognise this lordship of man, that it does 
lift him out of his subordinate place, and ever speak in a 
language which takes for granted that nature is to serve 
him, and not he to acquiesce in nature, that the Bible 
every where speaks rather of a God of men than a Creator 
of the universe. We accept willingly the reproach; we 
acknowledge and we glory in its entire truth, — that the 
eighth Psalm is but a single distinct utterance of that which 
all Scripture proclaim ; for that every where sets forth man 
as the crown of things, the last and the highest, the king to 
rule over the world, the priest to offer up its praises — and 

* Compare the remarkable words of Felix the Manichgean, and the 
fault which he finds with it on this very ground (Augustine Acta c. 
Felice Manichceo, 1. 1, c. 9:) Et quia venit Manicheeus et per suam 
prsedicationem docuit nos initium medium et finem ; docuit nos de 
fabrica mundi, quare facta est et unde facta et qui fecerunt ; 
docuit nos quare dies et quare nox ; doouit nos de cursu solis et 
lunse ; quia hoc in Paulo non audivimus, nee in coeterorum apos- 
tolorum scripturis, hoc credimus, quia ipse est Paraclitus. 



THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 29 

deals with nature not as co-ordinated with him, much less 
as superior ; but in entire subordination ; " Thou makest 
him to have dominion of the works of thy hands, and thou 
hast put all things in subjection under his feet." And 
herein Holy Scripture is one, that it is throughout the his- 
tory of man as distinct from nature, as immeasurably above 
nature — that it is throughout ethical, and does never, as so 
many of the mythic accounts of heathen religions, resolve 
itself on nearer inspection into the mere setting forth of 
physical appearances. 

It is then the history of man ; yet not of all men, only 
of a chosen portion of our race ; and such, if we have 
rightly seized the purpose and meaning of a Scripture and 
what it is intended to tell, it must needs be. It is true 
that this is too often brought against it as a short-coming. 
It is a frequent sneer on the part of the master-mocker of 
France, that the Bible dedicates its largest spaces, by far 
the greatest number of its pages, to the annals of a little 
tribe, which occupied, to use his very words, a narrow strip 
of mountainous territory, scarcely broader than Wales, leav- 
ing almost unnoticed the mighty empire of Egypt and 
Assyria; and he goes on to observe, that from a book which 
professes to go back, as this does, to the very beginning, 
and to be in possession of all authentic history from the 
first, to have in its keeping the archives of our race, we 
should gladly have received, even as we might have reason- 
ably expected, a few notices of these vast empires ; which 
had been cheaply purchased by the omission or abridgement 
of lives and incidents now written with such a special 
minuteness. 

Now it is no doubt remarkable, and a fact to awaken our 
earnest attention, that in a Book, wherein, if in any, all 
waste of room would have been spared, the lives of an Abra- 
ham, a Joseph, a David, fill singly spaces so large ; while 
huge empires rise and fall, and all their multitudes pass to 

3* 



30 LECTURE II. 

their graves, almost without a word. These vast empires 
are left in their utter darkness, or if a glimpse of light fall 
upon them for a moment, it is only because of the relations 
in which they are brought to this little tribe ; since no 
sooner do these relations cease, than they fall back into the 
obscurity out of which they emerged for a moment. 

But strange as it may at first sight appear, it belongs to 
the very essence of Scripture that it should be thus and no 
otherwise. For that is not a world-history, but a history 
of the kingdom of Glod j and He who ever chooses " the 
weak things of the earth to confound the things which are 
mighty," had willed that in the line of this family, this 
tribe, this little people, the restoration of the true humanity 
should be effected : and each man who at all realized the 
coming Restorer, each in whom that image of God, which 
was one day to be perfectly revealed in his Son, appeared 
with a more than usual distinctness, however indistinctly still, 
— every such man was singly a greater link in the world's 
history than all those blind millions of whom these records 
have refused to take knowledge. Those mountains of Israel, 
that little corner of the world, so often despised, so often 
wholly past over, was yet the citadel of the world's hope, the 
hearth on which the sparks that were yet to kindle the 
earth were kept alive. There the great reaction which was 
one day to find place against the world's sin was preparing ; 
and just as, were we tracing the course of a stream, not the 
huge morasses, not the vast stagnant pools on either side, 
would delay us; we should not, because of their extent, 
count them the river ; but that we should recognise as the 
stream, though it were the slenderest thread, in which an 
onward movement and current might be discerned ; so it is 
here. Egypt and Assyria and Babylon were but the vast 
stagnant morasses on either side; the man in whose seed 
the whole earth should be blest, he and his family were the 



THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 31 

little stream in which the life and onward motion of the 
world were to be traced. 

For indeed, properly speaking, where there are no work- 
ings, conscious or unconscious, to the great end of the 
manifestation of the Son of God in the flesh, — conscious, as 
in Israel, unconscious, as in Greece, — where neither those 
nor these are found, there history does not and cannot exist. 
For history, if it be not the merest toy, the idlest pastime 
of our vacant hours, is the record of the onward march of 
humanity towards an end. Where there is no belief in 
such an end, and therefore no advance toward it, no stir- 
rings of a divine Word in a people's bosom, where not as 
yet the beast's heart has been taken away, and a man's heart 
given, there history cannot be said to be. They belong not 
therefore to history, least of all to sacred history, those 
Babels, those cities of confusion, those huge pens, into which 
by force and fraud the early hunters of men, the Nimrods 
and Sesostrises, drave and compelled their fellows; and 
Scripture is only most true to its idea, while it passes them 
almost or wholly in silence by, while it lingers rather on the 
plains of Mamre, with the man that " believed God, and it was 
counted to him for righteousness," than by " populous No," 
or great Babylon, where no faith existed but in the blind 
powers of nature, and the brute forces of the natural man. 

And yet, that there were stirrings of a divine life, long- 
ings after and hopes of a Deliverer, at work in Israel, had 
not been, of itself, sufficient to exalt and consecrate its his- 
tory into a Scripture. These such a history must contain, 
but also something more and deeper than these ; else all in 
Greece and elsewhere that was struggling after moral free- 
dom, that was craving after light, all that bore witness to 
man's higher origin and nobler destinies, might have claimed 
by an equal right to be there. But Holy Scripture, accord- 
ing to the idea from which we started, is the history of men 
in a constitution — of men, not seeking relations with God, 



32 LECTURE II. 

but having them, and whose task is now to believe in them, 
and to maintain them. Its mournful reminiscences of a 
broken communion with heaven are evermore swallowed up 
in the firm and glorious assurances of a restored. The 
noblest efforts of heathenism were seekings after these rela- 
tions with God, if haply man might connect himself anew 
with a higher world, from which he had cut himself loose. 
But here man does not appear as seeking God, and therefore 
at best only dimly and uncertainly apprehending him ; but 
rather God appears as seeking man, therefore not seeking in 
vain, but ever finding — man only as seeking God, on the 
ground that God has already sought and found him, and has 
said to him, "Seek my face/' and in that saying has pledged 
Himself that the seeking shall not be in vain. With this, 
Scripture excludes all mere feelings after God, not as count- 
ing them worthless, — for precious and significant in the 
eyes of a Paul was the altar " To the unknown God/' 
reared at Athens, — but excludes them in that they belong 
to a lower stage of religious life than that to which it minis- 
ters, and in which it moves. It has no mythology ; no ideal 
which is not also real ; no dreams and anticipations of higher 
things than it is itself destined to record as actually brought 
to pass. These may be deep out-speakings of the spiritual 
needs of man, precious recollections of a state which once 
was his, but which now he has forfeited; yet being only 
utterances of his want, cries of his need, confessions of his 
loss, sharing, too, as they must ever, in the imperfections 
of which they testify, therefore they can find no place in a 
Bible. For that is in no way a record of man's various 
attempts to cure himself of the deep wound of his soul; it 
is no history of the experiments which he makes, as he 
looks round him to see if he may find on earth medicinal 
herbs that will meet his need ; but it presents him already 
in an hospital of souls, and under a divine treatment. Hea- 
then philosophy might indeed be a preparation for Christi- 



THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 33 

anity — heathen mythology, upon its better side, an uncon- 
scious prophecy of Christ ; yet were they only the negative 
preparation and witness ; Jewish religion was the positive ; 
and it is with the positive alone that a Scripture can have 
to do. 

Thus we have seen what, under some aspects, such a book 
must be : we have seen why it is not that, which men super- 
ficially looking at it, or in whom the speculative tendencies 
are stronger than the moral needs, might have desired to be. 
In the first place, that it is not the history of nature, but 
of man ; nor yet of all men, but only of those who are 
more or less conscious of their divine original, and have 
not, amid all their sins, forgotten that great word, " We are 
God's offspring j" — nor yet even of all these, but of those 
alone who had been brought by the word of the promise 
into immediate covenant relations with the Father of their 
spirits. We have seen it the history of an election, — of 
men under the direct and immediate education of God — not 
indeed for their own sakes only, as too. many among them 
thought, turning their election into a selfish thing, but that 
through them he might educate and bless the world. That 
it does not tell the story of other men — that it does not 
give a philosophy of nature, is not a deficiency, but is rather 
its strength and glory ; witnessing for the Spirit which has 
presided over its growth and formation, and never suffered 
aught which was alien to its great plan and purpose to find 
admission into it — any foreign elements to weaken its 
strength or trouble its clearness. 

Nor less does Holy Scripture give testimony for a perva- 
ding unity, an inner law according to which it unfolds itself 
as a perfect and organic whole, in the epoch at which growth 
in it ceases, and it appears henceforth as a finished book. 
So long as humanity was growing, it grew. But when the 
manhood of our race was reached, when man had attained 
his highest point, even union with God in his Son, then it 



34 LECTURE II. 

comes to a close. It carries hlin up to this, to his glorious 
goal, to the perfect knitting again of those broken rela- 
tions, through the life and death and resurrection of Him in 
whom God- and man were perfectly atoned. So long as 
there was any thing more to tell, any new revelation of the 
Name of God, any new relations of grace and nearness into 
which he was bringing his creatures, — so long the Bible was 
a growing, expanding book. But when all is given, when 
God, who at divers times spake to the world by his servants, 
had now spoken his last and fullest word by his Son, then 
to this Book, the record of that Word of his, there is added 
no more, even while there is nothing more to add ; — though 
it cannot end till it has shown in prophetic vision how this 
latest and highest which now has been given to man, shall 
unfold itself into the glory and blessedness of a perfected 
kingdom of heaven. 

For thus, too, it will mark itself as one, by returning 
visibly in its end upon its beginning. Vast as the course 
which it has traced, it has been a circle still, and in that 
most perfect form comes back to the point from whence it 
started. The heaven, which had disappeared from the 
earth since the third chapter of Genesis, reappears again in 
visible manifestation, in the latest chapters of the Revela- 
tion. The tree of life, whereof there were but faint remi- 
niscences in all the intermediate time, again stands by the 
river of the water of life, and again there is no more curse. 
Even the very differences of the forms under which the , 
heavenly kingdom reappears are deeply characteristic, mark- 
ing as they do, not merely that all is won back, but won 
back in a more glori ous shape than that in which it was 
lost, because won back in the Son. It is no longer Para- 
dise, but the New Jerusalem — no longer the garden, but 
now the city, of God, which is on earth. The change is 
full of meaning; no longer the garden, free, spontaneous,* 
and unlaboured, even as man's blessedness in the state of 



THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 35 

a first innocence would have been ; but the city, costlier 
indeed, more stately, more glorious, but at the same time, 
the result of toil, of labour, of pains — reared into a nobler 
and more abiding habitation, yet with stones which, after 
the pattern, of the " elect corner-stone," were each in its 
time laboriously hewn and painfully squared for the places 
which they fill. 

And surely we may be permitted to observe by the way, 
that this idea, which we plainly trace and recognise, of 
Scripture as a whole, this its architectonic character, cannot 
be without its weight in helping to determine the Canonical 
place and worth of the Apocalypse, which, as is familiar to 
many among us, has been sometimes called in question. 
Apart from all outward evidences in its favour, do we not 
feel that this wondrous book is needed where it is ? — that it 
is the key-stone of the arch, the capital of the pillar — that 
Holy Scripture had seemed maimed and imperfect without it, 
— that a winding up with the Epistles would have been no 
true winding up \ for in them the Church appears as still 
warring and struggling, still compassed about with the 
weaknesses and infirmities of its mortal existence — not 
triumphing yet, nor yet have entered into its glory. Such 
a termination had b.een as abrupt, as little satisfying as if, 
in the lower sphere of the Pentateuch, we had accompanied 
the children of Israel to the moment when they were just 
entering on the wars of Canaan ; and no book of Joshua 
had followed to record their battles and their victories, and 
how these did not cease till they rode on the high places of 
the earth, and rested each man quietly in the lot of his con- 
quered inheritance. 

And again, this oneness of Holy Scripture, when we feel 
it, is a sufficient, even as it is a complete, answer to a very 
favourite topic of Romish Controversialists. They are fond 
of bringing out how much there is of accident in the struc- 
ture, nay, even in the existence of Scripture, — that we have 



36 LECTURE IT. 

Gospel (the third) written at a private man's request, — 
another, (the fourth) because heresies had risen up which 
needed to be checked — epistles owing their origin to causes 
equally fortuitous — one, because temporary disorders had 
manifested themselves at - " 1 Corinth, — another, because an 
Apostle, having promised to visit a city, from some unex- 
pected cause was hindered — a third, to secure the favourable 
reception of a fugitive slave by his master — that of the 
New Testament at least, the chiefest part is thus made up 
of occasional documents called forth by emergent needs. 
And the purpose of this slight on Scripture is evident, the 
conclusion near at hand — which is this, how little likely it is 
that a book so formed, so growing, should contain an abso- 
lute and sufficient guide of life and rule of doctrine — how 
needful some supplementary teaching. 

But when once this unity of God's Word has been re- 
vealed to us, when our eye has learned to recognise not 
merely the marks and signs of a higher wisdom, guiding 
and inspiring each several part, but also the relation of each 
several part to the whole ; when it has risen up before us, 
not as aggregated from without, but as unfolded from within, 
and in obedience to an inner law, then we shall feel that, 
however accidental may appear the circumstances of its 
growth, yet this aecident which seemed to accompany its 
production, and to preside in the calling out of the espe- 
cial books which we possess, and no other, was no more 
than the accident which God is ever weaving into the woof 
of his providence, and not merely weaving into it, but 
which is the staple out of which its whole web is woven. 

Thus brethren, we have been led to contemplate these 
oracles of God in their deep inner unity ; we have seen not 
merely how they possess, but how we can reverently trace 
them in the possession of, that oneness of plan and purpose, 
which should make them effectual for the unfolding the spi- 
ritual life of men. We have seen how men's expectations 



THE UNITY OF SCRIPTURE. 37 

of finding something there which they did not .find, with 
their disappointments at its absence, have ever grown out 
of a mistaken apprehension of what a Scripture ought to 
be ; how the presence of that which they miss would indeed 
have marred it, would have contradicted its fundamental 
idea, would have been a discord amid its deep harmonies, 
even as the discords which men find in it come oftentimes 
as its highest harmonies to the purged ear. 

Nor is it without its warning to ourselves, that these 
murmurings and complaints do most often evidently grow out 
of a moral fault in them that make them. Men have lost 
the key of knowledge — the master-key which would have 
opened to them every door; and then they wander with 
perplexed hearts up and down this stately palace which the 
Eternal Wisdom has builded, but of which every goodlier 
room is closed against them, till, in the end, they complain 
that it is no such peerless palace after all, but only as other 
works which man's art has reared. Nor is this conclusion 
strange ; for unless they bring to it a moral need, unless 
that moral need be to them the interpreter of every part, 
and gather all that is apparently abnormal in it under a 
higher and reconciling law the Book, in its deepest meaning 
and worth, will remain a riddle to them still. 

But this moral need, what is it ? It is the sense that we 
are sundered and scattered each 'from God, each from his 
fellow-man, each from himself — with a belief deep as the 
foundations of our life, that it is the will of God to gather 
all these scattered and these sundered together anew — this, 
with the conviction which will rise out of this, that all which 
bears on the circumstances of this recovering and regathering 
is precious ; that nothing is of highest worth which does not 
bear upon this. Then we shall see in this Word that it is 
the very history which we require — that altogether, nothing 
but that — the history of the restoring the defaced image of 
God, the re-constitution of a ruined but Godlike race, in 

4 



38 LECTURE II. 

the image of G-od's own Son — the deliverance of all in that 
race, who were willing to be delivered, from the idols of 
sense, from the false gods who would hold them in bondage, 
and would fain make them their drudges and slaves. 

And, brethren, what is it that shall give unity to our 
lives, but the recognition of the same great idea which gives 
unity to this Book? Those lives, they seem often broken 
into parts, with no visible connexion between one part and 
another ; our boyhood, we know not how to connect it with 
our youth, our youth with our manhood : the different tasks 
of our life, we want to bind them up in a single sheaf, to feel 
that, however manifold and apparently disconnected they 
are, there is yet a bond that binds them into one. Our 
hearts, we want a central point for them, as it were a heart 
within the heart, and we oftentimes seek this in vain. Oh, 
what a cry has gone up from thousands and ten thousands 
of souls ! and this the burden of the cry, I desire to be one 
in the deep centre of my being, to be one and not many — to 
be able to reduce my life to one law — to be able to explain 
it to myself in the master-light of one idea, to be no longer 
rent, torn, and distracted, as I am now. 

And whence shall this oneness come ? where shall we 
find, amid all the chances and changes of the world, this 
law of our life, this centre of our being, this key-note to 
which setting our lives, their seeming discords shall reveal 
themselves as their deepest harmonies ? Only in God, only 
in the Son of God — only in the faith that what Scripture 
makes the end and purpose of God's dealing with our race, 
is also the end and purpose of his dealing with each one of 
. us, namely, that his Son may be manifested in us — that we, 
with all things which are in heaven and all things which are 
in earth, may be gathered together in Christ, even in Him. 



LECTURE III. 

THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 

Matthew XIV. 20. 
They did all eat, and were filled. 

It was the aim of my preceding Lecture to trace the 
unity which reigns in Scripture, that it has a law to which 
each part of it may be referred, a root out of which it all 
grows. It will be my purpose in the present, to bring out 
before you how this Book, which is one, is also manifold ) a 
fact which we may not be so ready to recognize the instant 
that it is presented to us, as the other. For the truth which 
occupied us last Sunday, of the Bible as one Book, not 
merely one because bound together in the covers of a single 
volume, but as being truly one, while it testifies in every 
part of one and the same Lord, while it is every where the 
utterance of one Spirit; this, whether consciously or un- 
consciously, has strong possession of men's minds in this our 
land. We feel, and rightly, that every attempt to consider 
any of its parts in absolute isolation from the other, rent 
away from the connexion in which it stands is false, and can 
lead to no profitable result ; and it is hardly possible to esti- 
mate too highly the blessing of this, that the band which 
binds for us the parts of this volume together is unbroken 
even in thought ; that we still feel ourselves to have, not a 
number of sacred books, but one sacred Book, which, not 
merely for convenience sake, but out of a far deeper feeling, 
we comprehend under one name. 

Yet, on the other hand, there are other truths which, 
if we mean to enter into full possession of our treasures, we 
need also to make thoroughly our own. This idea of the 

(39) 



40 LECTURE III. 

oneness of Holy Scripture is incomplete and imperfect, till it 
pass into the higher idea of its unity ; till we acknowledge 
that it is not sameness which reigns there; that, besides 
being one, it is also many; that as in the human body we, 
having many members, are one body, and the perfection of 
the body is not the repetition of the same member over and 
over again, but the harmonious tempering of different 
members, all being instinct with one life — not otherwise is 
it with Scripture. For in that, whether we look at the Old 
or New Testament, the same richness and variety of form 
reveal themselves, so that it may truly be said, that out of 
the ground of this Paradise, the Lord God has made " to 
grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for 
food;" all that the earth has fairest appearing here in fairer 
and more perfect form — the fable, only here transformed 
into the parable — the ode transfigured into the psalm — 
oracles into prophecies — histories of the world into histories 
of the kingdom of heaven. Nor is tragedy wanting, though 
for CEdipus, we have the man of Uz; nor epos, though for 
" the tale of Troy divine," ours is the story of the New 
Jerusalem, " coming down out of heaven as a bride adorned 
for her husband." And it will be my desire to show how 
this also was needful, if it was to be the Book which should 
indeed leaven the world, which should offer nutriment, not 
merely for some men, but for all men ; which should not 
tyrannically lop men till they were all of one length, but 
should encourage in every man the free developement of all 
which God had given him. Thus it must needs have been, 
if the Spirit by this Word was to sanctify all in every man 
which was capable of being sanctified; which, coming 
originally from God, could be redeemed from the defilements 
of this world, and in purer shape be again restored unto 
Him. 

It will be my task then to consider to-day the relations 
of likeness and difference in which various parts of Scrip- 



THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 41 

ture stand to one another ; to show how the differences are 
not accidental, but do plainly correspond to certain fixed 
differences in the mental and moral constitutions of men ; 
how there is evidently a gracious purpose of attracting all 
men by the attractions which shall be most potent upon 
them ; of spreading a table at which all may sit down and 
find that wherein their soul delights, till those words of our 
text, " They did all eat and were filled/' shall not be less 
true in regard of all the faithful now, — true rather in a 
higher sense, — than they were in regard of those compara- 
tively few, whom the Lord nourished with that bread of 
wonder in the wilderness. And truly this Book, in the 
plainness and simplicity of many, and those most important, 
parts of it, might be likened well to the five barley- loaves 
of the Lord's miracle. Seeing them about to set before the 
great spiritual hunger of the world, seeing the multitudes 
waiting to be fed, even disciples might have been tempted 
to exclaim, " What are they among so many ?" But the 
great Giver of the feast confidently replies, " Make the men 
sit down /' and they have sat down — wise men and simple, 
philosophers and peasants, " besides women and children/' 
— and there has been enough and to spare ; all have been 
nourished, all have been quickened ; none have been sent 
empty away. 

And first, let us take those books which must ever be 
regarded as the central books, relating as they do to the 
central fact, to the life of our blessed Lord, and which will 
afford the fullest illustration of my meaning. It is a fact 
which would at once excite every man's most thoughtful 
attention, were it not that familiarity had blunted us to its 
significance, that we should have, not one history only, but 
four parallel histories, of the life of Christ — a fact which 
indeed finds a slight anticipation in the parallel records 
which the Old Testament has preserved of some portions of 
Jewish history. None will call this an accident, or count 

4* 



42 LECTURE III. 

that the Providence which watches over the fall of a spar- 
row, or any slightest incident of the world, was not itself 
the bringer about of a circumstance which should have so 
mighty an influence on all the future unfolding of the 
Church. It is part, no doubt, of this spreading of a table 
for the spiritual needs of all, that we have thus not one 
Gospel, but four ; which yet in their higher unity, may be 
styled, according to that word of Origen's, rather a four- 
sided Gospel* than four Gospels, even as out of the same 
instinctive sense of its unity, the whole Instrument, which 
contained the four, was entitled Evangelium in the early 
Church. 

And if we follow this more closely up, we can trace, I 
think, a peculiar vocation in each of the Evangelists for 
catching some distinct rays of the glory of Christ, which 
the others would not catch, and for reflecting them to the 
world — so that the terms, Gospel according to St. Matthew, 
according to St. Mark, and so on, are singularly happy, and 
imply much more than we, for whom the words are little 
more than a technical designation of the different gospels, 
are wont to find in them. The first is the Gospel according 
to St. Matthew — the Gospel as it appeared to him. This 
which he has portrayed is his Christ ; under this aspect the 
Deliverer of men appeared to him, and in this he has pre- 
sented Him to the world ; and so also with the others. For 
Christ, ever one and the same, does yet appear with differ- 
ent sides of his glory reflected by the different Evangelists. 
They were themselves men of various temperaments ; they 
had each the special need of some different classes of men 
in their eye when they wrote their Gospels ; and as these 
classes, though under altered names, still subsist, they have 
in this respect also, as ministering to these various needs, an 
everlasting value. 

* F;vayy s"kiov -r'sT'paycovoj/. Thus too Augustine (In Ev. Joh., 
Tract. 26:) QuatuorEvangelia, velpotiusquatuorlibriuniusEvangelii. 



THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 43 

Thus the first Gospel, that of St. Matthew, was evidently 
a Gospel designed for the pious Israelite, for him who was 
waiting the theocratic King, the Son of Abraham, the Son 
of David; who desired to find in the New Testament the 
fulfilment of the prophecies of the Old, and in Christianity 
the perfect flower, of which Judaism was the root and stem. 
And as among the Epistles that of St. James, so among the 
Gospels, this of St. Matthew was to serve as the gentle and 
almost imperceptible transition for so many as clung to the 
forms of Old Testament piety; and desired to hold fast the 
historic connexion of all God's dealings from the first. 

But the second Gospel, written, as all Church tradition 
testifies, under the influence of St. Peter, and at Rome, 
bears marks of an evident fitness for the practical Roman 
world — for the men who, while others talked had done ; 
and who would not at first crave to hear what Christ had 
spoken, but what He had wrought. It is eminently the 
Gospel of action. It is brief; it records comparatively few 
of our Lord's sayings, almost none of his longer discourses ; 
it occupies itself mainly with his works, with the mighty 
power of his ministry, into which ministry it rushes almost 
without a preparatory note. Some deeper things it has not, 
but presents a soul-stirring picture of the conquering might 
and energy of Christ and of his Word. 

But the third Gospel, that of St. Luke, composed by the 
trusted companion of St. Paul, and itself the correlative of 
his Epistles, while it sets forth one and the same Christ as 
the two which went before, yet in some respects sets Him 
forth in another light. Not so much with St. Matthew, 
" Jesus Christ, a minister of the circumcision for the truth 
of God, to confirm the promises made unto the fathers'' — 
not so much, with St. Mark, Jesus Christ, " the Lion of 
the tribe of Judah," rushing as with lion-springs from 
victory to victory ; but Jesus Christ, the Saviour of all men, 
is the object of his portraiture. This is what he loves to 



44 lecture in. 

dwell on, — the manner in which not Israel alone, but the 
whole heathen world, was destined to glorify God for his 
mercy in Christ Jesus ; he describes Him as the loving phy- 
sician, the gracious healer of all, the Good Samaritan that 
bound up the wounds of every stricken heart; in whom all 
the small, and despised, and crushed, and down-trodden of 
the earth should find a gracious and ready helper. There- 
fore, and in accordance with this, his plan, has he gathered 
up for us much which no other has done; he sets the 
seventy disciples for the world over against St. Matthew's 
twelve Apostles for Israel; he breaks through narrow 
national distinctions — tells of that Samaritan that alone 
showed kindness — of that other, who, of ten, alone remem- 
bered to be thankful ; and his, too, and his only, the para- 
ble of the Prodigal Son, itself a gospel within the Gospel. 

But to hasten on from the characteristics of the earlier 
three, which might well detain us much longer, something 
was yet wanting; — a Gospel in which the higher speculative 
tendencies, which were given to men not to be crushed or 
crippled, should find their adequate satisfaction— a Gospel 
which should link itself on with whatever had occupied the 
philosophic mind of heathen or of Jew — the correction of 
all which in this was false — the complement of all which 
was deficient. And such he gave us, for whom the Church 
has ever found the soaring eagle as the fittest emblem* — he 
who begins by declaring that the Word of God, whereof 
men had already learned to speak so much, was also the 
Son of God, and had been made flesh, and had dwelt among 



* Thus the Christian poet: 

Ccelum transit, veri rotani 
Solis ibi vidit, totam 
Mentis figens aciem : 
Speculator spiritalis 
Quasi Seraphim sub alis 
Dei videt faciem. 



Volat avis sine rneta 

Quo nee vates, nee propheta 

Evolavit altius ; 

Tarn implenda quam impleta 

Nunquam vidit tot secreta 

Purus homo puriua. 



THE MANIFOLDNESS OP SCRIPTURE. 45 

us, full of grace and truth, — who, too, has brought out the 
inner, and so to speak, the mystical relations of the faithful 
with their Lord, as none other before him had done.* 

It is true that this fulness under which the life of our 
Lord has been set forth to us, being, as it is, one of the 
gracious designs of God for our good, has been laid hold of 
by adversaries of the Faith, who would fain wrest it to their 
ends. Taking the difference where it is the most striking, 
they have bidden us to note how unlike the Christ of the 
first three Gospels and of the fourth ) and what a different 
colouring is spread over this Gospel and over those j and 
they would draw their conclusion, that either here or there 
historic accuracy must be wanting, that both portraits cannot 
be faithful. 'We allow the charge, so far as the difference, 
and only reject it when it assumes a diversity, of setting 
forth. There are features of our Lord which we should 
have missed, but for his portraiture who lay upon the Lord's 
bosom ; deep words which he has caught up, for which no 
other words that any other has recorded would have been 
adequate substitutes. But what then ? This is not a weak 
point with us, but a strong. We rejoice and glory in this, 
rather than seek to gloss it over or conceal it. So far 
from being first detected by a hostile criticism, an early 
Father of the Church had expressed this very distinction in 
words which in sound perhaps are almost over-bold, styling 
the first three Gospels, £vayy£%va cafiaiftxa, and the fourth an 
svayye'kiov 7tvsvfxa'ti,xov. Yet it is needless to observe, that 
herein he meant not to cast the faintest slight on those by 

* See Origen's interesting discussion (Comm.. in Joan., Tom. i.) 
on the relation of the Gospels to the other Scriptures, and their 
relation, within themselves, one to another. On this latter subject 
he expresses himself thus : Tofyt^Wov ioivvv siittXv a7tapx~'} v ^- £v 
7i(X6^v ypa$wv elvcu to* svayys'Kia, tZ>v bi fvayyeTitwy cwtap^j/ to 
xata loidvvqv. 



46 LECTURE III. 

comparison with this, but would only imply that those set 
forth more the outer, and this the inner, life of Christ. 

And for the fact itself, do we not find analogies to it, 
however weak ones they may be, in lower regions of the 
spiritual life ? To take an example which must be familiar 
to every scholar, — how different the Socrates of Xenophon, 
and the Socrates of Plato. Yet shall we therefore leap to 
the conclusion, that if the one has painted the master truly, 
then the other has portrayed him falsely ? Such a conclu- 
sion may lie upon the surface; it might appear to us an 
easy solution of the difficulty ; yet were it a very different 
solution from that to which all the profoundest inquirers 
into the matter have arrived. Were it not wiser to sup- 
pose, with them, that each of the great scholars of the Sage 
appropriated and carried away, as from a rich and varied 
treasure-house, that which he prized the most, that which 
was most akin to himself and his own genius, that which by 
the natural process of assimilation he had made most truly 
and entirely his own; — the practical soldier, the man of 
strong common sense, appropriating and carrying away his 
world-wisdom, his popular philosophy ; the more meditative 
disciple taking as his portion the deeper speculations of 
their common Master concerning the Good and the True ? 
And if thus it prove with eminent servants of the Truth — ■ 
if they are so rich and manifold that they present them- 
selves under divers aspects to divers men, it being appointed 
them in their lower sphere to feed many, — if, like some 
rich composite Corinthian metal, they yield iron for this 
man's spade, and gold for the other's crown, how much 
more was this to be looked for from Him, who was the 
King of Truth, who has to feed and enrich, not some, but 
all ; and this, not in some small and scanty measure, but 
who was to satisfy all in all ages with goodness and truth ? 
How inevitable was it that He, the Sun of the spiritual 



THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 



47 



heaven, should find no single mirror large enough to take 
in all his beams — should only be adequately presented to 
the world, when many from many sides did, under the 
direct teachings of God's Spirit, undertake to set him forth. 
Doubtless the pregnant symbol of the early Church, ac- 
cording to which the four Gospels found their type and pro- 
phecy in the four rivers of Paradise, that together watered 
the whole earth, going each a different way, and yet 
issuing all from a single head ; — a symbol, which we find 
evermore repeated in the works of early Christian art, 
wherein from a single cross-surmounted hill, four streams 
are seen welling out ; this symbol was so great and general 
a favorite, because it did embody under a beautiful image, 
this fact, namely, how the Gospels were indeed four, and 
yet in their higher unity but one.* And so not less, when 
the Evangelists, were found, as they often were, in the four 
living creatures of Ezekiel's vision, of whom each with a 
different countenance looked a different way, and yet all of 
them together upheld the throne and chariot of God, and ever 
moved as being informed by one and the self-same Spirit; this 
too was something more and better than a mere fanciful 



* Allusions to it are frequent in the early hymnologists. 
one of them in a hymn, De SS. Evangelistis : 



Thus, in 



Horum rivo ebretatis 
Sitis crescat cantatas, 
Ut de fonte Deitatis 
Satiemur plenius. 
Horum trahat nos doctrina 
Vitiorum de sentina, 
Sicque ducat ad divina 
Ab imo superius. 

Another, too, in a hymn, De S. Joanne Evangelista : 



Paradisus his rigatur, 
Viret, floret, fecunclatur, 
His ahundat, his letatur, 
Quatuor fluminibus. 
Fons est Christus, hi sunt rivi, 
Fons est altus, hi proclivi, 
Ut saporem fontis vivi 
Ministrent fidelibus. 



Inter ilios primitivos 
Veros veri fontis rivos 
Joannes exiliit, 



Toti mundo propinare 
Nectar illud salutare 
Quod de throno prodiit. 



48 



LECTURE III. 



playing with Scripture ; there was a deep truth lying at the 
root of this application, and absolutely justifying its use.* 

And as we have a Gospel which stands thus four-square, 
with a side facing each side of the spiritual world, so have 
we a two-fold development of the more dogmatic element of 
the New Testament. For, like as the seed, one in itself, 
yet falls into halves in the process of its fructifying, or as 



* The first that we know of who connected these with the four 
Evangelists was Ireneus. He says [Con. Hazr., i. 3, c. 2, $ 8,) 
Tstpd/xop^a yap ta £"wa, tetpafioptyov xal to fuayyi^tov, and 
draws out at length the fitness of each to represent each ; on which 
see Suicer's Thes. s. v. £vayye%i6tr,$. It was taken up by many 
after him ; thus by Jerome, Comm. in Ezek. c. i. ; Prol. in Comm. 
super. Matth. ; and Ep. 50 : Matthseus, Marcus, Lucas, et Johannes, 
quadriga Domini, et verum Cherubim, per totum corpus oculati 
sunt, scintillas emicant, discurrunt, fulgura, pedes habent rectos et 
in sublime tendentes, terga pennata et ubique volitantia. Tenent 
se mutu6, sibique perplexi sunt, et quasi rota in rota volvuntur, et 
purgunt quoquumque eos flatus Sancti Spiritus perduxerit. Cf. 
Augustine, De Cons. Evang. 1. 1, c. 6, and the Christian poet sings 
thus: 



Civea thronum majestatis 
Cum spiritibus beatis 
Quatuor diversitatis 
Astant animalia. 
Formam prioium aquilinam, 
Et secundum leoninam ; 
Sed humanam et bovinam 
Duo gerunt alia. 
And another: 
Cur am agens sui gregis 
Pastor bonus, auetor legis 
Quatuor iiistituit : 
Quadri orbis ad medelam, 
Formam juris et cautelam 
Per quos scribi voluit. 

Circa thema generale 
Habet quisque speciale 
Sibi privilegium ; 



Forma3 formant figurarum 
Formas Evangelistarum 
Quorum iniber doctrinarum. 
Stillat in Ecclesia. 
Hi sunt Marcus, et Matthasus, 
Lucas, et quern Zebedaeus 
Pater misit tibi, Deus, 
Dum laxaret retia. 

Quos designat in propheta 
Forma pictus sub discreta 
Vultus animalium. 

His quadrigus deportatur 
Mundo Deos, sublimatur 
Ista area vectibus : 
Paradisi hsec fluenta 
Nova fluunt sacramenta, 
Quaa irrorant gentibus. 



THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 49 

the one force of the magnet manifests itself at two opposing 
poles, exactly according to the same law, reappearing in the 
spiritual world, we have two developments of the same 
Christian Theology, which make themselves felt from the 
very first, whereof St. Paul may be taken as chief represen- 
tative of the one, and St. John of the other. We cannot 
do more than trace the distinction in some of its broadest 
features. We see then St. Paul making man the starting 
point of his theology. The divine image in man, that 
image lost, the impossibility of its restoration by any 
powers of his own ; the ever deeper errors of the sin-dark- 
ened intellect ; the ever vainer struggles of the sin-enslaved 
will ; — it is from this human" side of the truth that he starts ; 
these are the grounds which he first lays, — as eminently in 
his great dogmatic Epistle to the Romans. And only when 
he has brought out this confession of a fall, of an infinite 
short-coming from the true ideal of humanity, and from the 
glory of God, only when the cry, " Oh, wretched man that 
I am, who shall deliver me V has been wrung out from the 
bond-slaves of evil, does he bring in the mighty Redeemer, 
and the hymn of praise, 'the "I thank God through 
Jesus Christ" of the redeemed. But St. John, upon the 
other hand, starts from the opposite point, from the theology 
in the more restricted seuse of the word ; in this justifying 
the title 6 ©fo?io<yd?, which he bears. His centre and 
starting point is the Divine Love, and out of that he unfolds 
all; not delineating, as his brother Apostle, any mighty 
birth-pangs, in which the new creature is born; since 
rather in that passing from death unto life, and in that 
abiding in the Father and in the Son which follows there- 
from, the discovery of sin does not run long before, but 
rather goes hand in hand with, the discovery of the grace 
of God for forgiving, and the power of God for overcoming, 
that sin which by the Spirit of Christ is gradually revealed. 
Thus we have man delivered in St. Paul, God delivering in 

5 



50 LECTURE ITT, 

St. John ; man rising in the one, God stooping in the other ; 
and thus each travels over a hemisphere in the great orb of 
Christian Truth and they, not each singly, but between 
them, embrace and encircle it all. 

For this is a part of the glory of Christ as compared with 
his servants, as compared with the chiefest of his ser- 
vants, that He alone stands at the absolute centre of 
humanity, the one completely harmonious man, unfold- 
ing all which was in that humanity equally upon all 
sides, fully upon all sides — the only one in whom the 
real and ideal met, and were absolutely at one. Every 
other man has idiosyncrasies, characteristics — some fea- 
tures, that is, of his character, marked more strongly than 
others, fitnesses for one task rather than for another, more 
genial powers in one direction than in others. Nor even 
are the greatest, a St. Paul or a St. John, exempted from 
this law ; but, according to this law, are made to serve for 
the kingdom of God; and the regeneration, even that 
mighty transformation itself, does not dissolve these charac- 
teristics, but rather hallows and glorifies them, using them 
for the work of God. And thus, in the power of these 
special gifts, that which lay as a fruitful germ in the doc~ 
trine, or more truly, in the facts of our Lord's life, was 
by his two Apostles developed upon this side and upon that. 

And as it was meant that the Gospel of Christ should 
embrace all lands, should fix, at its first entrance into the 
world, a firm foot upon either of its two great cultivated 
portions, so in these two, in St. Paul and in St. John, we 
recognise wondrous preparations in the Providence of God 
for the winning to the obedience of the cross both the 
western and the eastern world. "Who can fail to see in the 
great Apostle of Tarsus, in his discursive intellect, in his 
keen dialectics, in his philosophic training, the man armed to 
dispute with Stoic and Epicurean at Athens ; who should 
teach the Church how she should take the West for her inheri- 



THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 51 

tance ? — nor less was he the man who by the past struggles 
of his inner life and the consequent fulness and power with 
which he brought out the scheme of our justification should 
become the spiritual forefather of the Augustines and 
Luthers, of all them who have brought out for us, with the 
sense of personal guilt, the sense also of personal deliver- 
ance, the consciousness of a personal standing of each one 
of us before God. And in St. John, the full significance 
of whose writings for the Church is probably yet to be re- 
vealed, and it may be, will not appear till the coming in of 
the nations of the east into the fold, we have the progenitor 
of every mystic, in the nobler sense of that word — of every 
contemplative spirit that has delighted to sink and to lose 
itself, and the sense of its own littleness, in the brightness 
and in the glory of God. Shall we not thank God, shall 
we not recognise as part of his loving wisdom, that thus 
none are left out ; that while there are evidently among men 
two leading types of mind, he has made provision for them 
both — for the discursive and the intuitive, — for the school- 
man and the mystic, — for them who trust through knowing 
to see, and for them also who believe that only through 
seeing they can know ; — that, whatever in their intellectual 
condition men may be, the net is laid out to catch them ? 
For then, when once they are taken, all that might have 
been in them of overbalance in one direction, all of 
faulty excess, is gradually done away and redressed, till 
they and those that have been brought in by an opposite 
method, are more and more led to a mutual recognition and 
honouring of the gifts of each other, and to the unity of a 
perfect man in Jesus Christ. 

Nor is it only that there is a different nourishment 
for different souls, but the same nourishment is also so 
curiously mixed and tempered, that it is felt to be for 
all. As, perhaps, the most signal example of this, let 
us only seek to realize to ourselves what the Book of 



ssion of 


>m— 


-how 


are 


met, 


and 


gra- 


o it, 


and 



52 LECTURE III. 

Psalms, itself, according to that beautiful exj 
Luther's, a Bible in little/ has been, and for v 
men of all conditions, all habits of thought, hav 
vying with one another in expressions of affect! 
titude to this book, in telling what they owed 
what it had proved to them. Men seemingly the most un- 
likely to express enthusiasm about any such matter — lawyers 
and statists immersed deeply in the world's business, clas- 
sical scholars familiar with other models of beauty, other 
tandards of art — these have been forward as the forwardest 
to set their seal to this book, have left their confession that 
it was the voice of their inmost heart, that the spirit of it past 
into their spirits as did the spirit of no other book, that it 
found them more often and at greater depths of their being, 
lifted them to higher heights than did any other — or, as 
one greatly suffering man, telling, of the solace which he 
found from this book of Psalms in the hours of a long im- 
prisonment, has expressed it, — that it bore him up, as a 
lark perched between an eagle's wings is borne up into the 
everlasting sunlight, till he saw the world and all its trouble 
for ever underneath him. I can imagine no fairer volume 
than one of such thankful acknowledgments as I have de- 
scribed, and it is a volume which might easily be gathered, 
for such on all sides abound ; not a few of them as large, 
as free, as rapturous as that of our own Hooker, which 
must be present to the minds of many of us here. Nor is 
it wonderful that there should be such ; for, to quote but 
one noble utterance* in relation to this book, " the conflict 
of naked power with righteousness, of the visible with the 
invisible, of confusion with order, of the devilish with the 
divine, of death with life, this is its subject. And because 
this is the subject of all human anxieties, this book has 
been that in which living and suffering men in all ages 

* Maurice's Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy in the Encyclop. 
Metrqpoliiana. 



THE MANIFOLDNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 53 

have found a language, which they have felt to be a myste- 
rious anticipation of, and provision for, their own especial 
wants, and in which they have gradually understood that 
the Divine voice is never so truly and distinctly heard, 
as when it speaks through human experience and sym- 
pathies."* 

* The reader may be well pleased to see a few more of these 
brought at a single glance under his eye. St. Basil may fitly lead. 
In a passage Horn. I. Psalmos, quoted at much greater length in 
Suicer's Thess. s. v. $a%/AO$ 3?a%{i6s Saifiovcov tyvyahtvtrfiiov t'jjjt'wv 
dyyeXwv fiorfizlo.c, artouycoy^' OTi%ov ev $6j3ot$ vvxtsptvoi,$ dfartaucRj 
xortcov yj/xepivuv' viqTiioi^ 6\o$6.%zia' axfid^ovoiv yxoXku)7tiGy.a' rtps- 
cfivtipois 7tapryopca' yvvcu^i x6g(ao$ ap/xoScJotato^' tfdj ap^/uas olx- 
t^ffc' T'dj dyopdj autypovi^si,' siaayofievoc^ 6 i toi%zLu>6i$, rtpoxojttovtcov 
arf^cas, -tsKaiovixevcov atr-pty/xa, sxx^a^ag ^covrj. ovto$ tag loprdj 
tyai8pvvei ovtos trjv xatd ®sov hiirtyv Sypiovpysi. 3>atyt6$ yap 
xao kx Xtdivris xapbias ddxpvov ixxaXeitao 3?»fyi6j to twv ay 
yshiov tpyov, to ovpdvtov rtohitsv/xa, to jtvsv/.iatLxbv dvjxlafia. 
x. t. %. St. Ambrose, as it was often his manner to reproduce 
what he found in the Greek Fathers to his purpose, would seem to 
have had this passage of his great eastern contemporary in his 
mind when he composed his not less beautiful land of the Psalms. 
Enarr. in Ps. i. Here too it is but a fragment which can be quoted : 
Historia instruit, Lex docet, prophetia annunciat, correptio castigat, 
moralitas suadet, in libro Psalmorum profectus est omnium, et me- 
dicina qusedani salutis humanas. Quicunque legerit, habet quo 
propriae vulnera passionis speciali possit cura remedio... Quantum 
laboratur in Ecclesia ut fiat silentium, cum lectiones leguntur ! Si 
unus loquatur, obstrepunt universi : cum psalmus legitur, ipse sibi 
est effector silentii. Omnes loquuntur, et nullus obstrepit. Psalmum 
reges sine potestatis supercilio resultant. In hoc se ministerio Da- 
vid gaudebat videri. Psalmus cantatur ab imperatoriabus, jubilatur 
a populis. Certant clamare singuli quod omnibus proficit. Domi 
psalmus canitur, foris recensetur. Sine labore percipitur, cum 
voluptate servatur : psalmus dissidentes copulat, discordes sociat, 
offensos reconciliat...Certat in Psalmo doctrina cum gratia simul. 
Cantatur ad delectationem, discitur ad eruditionem. Nam violen- 
tiora precepta non permanent ; quod autem cum suavitate percepe- 
ris, id infusum semel praecordiis, non consuevit elabi. And Augus- 

5* 



54 LECTURE III 

Indeed, in the fact of such a book as the Psalter forming 
part of our sacred Instrument, we trace a most gracious 

tine (Confess., 1. 9, c. 4,) speaks of the manner in -which he exulted 
in the Psalms at the time of his first conversion : Quas tibi, Deus 
meus, voces dedi cum legerem psalmos David... acri dolor indignabar 
Manichjeis et quomodo in te inflammabar ex eis, et accendebar 
eos recitar si possem toto orbe terrarum adversum typhum hu- 
man! generis... Quam vehementi et miserebar eos rursus, quod ilia 
sacramenta, ilia medicamenta nesicrent, et insani essent adversus 
antidotum quo sani esse potuissent. 

Jeremy Taylor, in his Preface to the Psalter of David speaking 
of the manner in which, by the trouble of the civil wai : e was de- 
prived of his books and his retirements, and how in h:' .privation 
he found comfort here, thus goes on: "Indeed, when I . ne to look 
upon the Psalter with a nearer observation, and an ey -ligent to 
espy any advantage and remedies there deposited. , found so 
many admirable promises, so rare variety of the expr : ons of the 
mercies of God, so many consolatory hymns, the coram moration of 
so many deliverances from dangers and deaths and enemies, so 
many miracles of mercy and salvation, that I began to be so confi- 
dent as to believe there could come no affliction great enough to 
spend so great a stock of comfort as was laid up in the treasure 
of the Psalter ; the saying of St. Paul was here verified, ' If 
sin' and misery ' did abound, then did grace superabound ;' 
and as we believe of the passion of Christ, it was so great as 
to be able to satisfy a thousand worlds ; so is it of the comforts 
of David's Psalms, they are more than sufficient to repair all the 
breaches of mankind." And Donne (Sermon 66,) taking his text 
from Ps. lxiii. 8, proceeds : " The Psalms are the manna of the 
Church. As manna tasted to every man like that that he liked best, 
so do the Psalms minister instruction and satisfaction to every man 
in every emergency and occasion. David was not only a clear pro- 
phet of Christ himself, but a prophet of every particular Christian ; 
he foretells what I, what any, shall do and suffer and say. And as 
the whole book of Psaims is oleum effusum, an ointment poured out 
upon all sorts of sores, a searcloth that supples all bruises, a 
balm that searches all wounds, so are there some certain psalms 
that are. imperial psalms, that command over all affections, and 
spread themselves over all occasions; catholic universal psalms 
that apply themselves to all necessities." 



THE MANIFOLDNESS OP SCRIPTURE. 55 

purpose of God. For in the very idea of a Revelation is 
implied rather a speaking of God to men than of men to 
God ; and such a speaking from heaven predominantly finds 
place in all other books of Holy Scripture. Yet how greatly 
had we been losers, had there been no corresponding record of 
the answering voices that go up from earth unto heaven. 
How earnestly should we have craved a standard by which 
to try the feelings, the utterances of our spirits, — a rule 
whereby to know whether they were healthy and true, 
the same voices, the same cries, as those of each other 
regenerate man. Such a rule, such a standard we have 
here ; man is speaking unto God j that which came from 
heaven is returning to heaven once more. Here we have 
insight into the mystery of prayer; streams of life are rising 
up as high as the heights from which first they came down ; 
the mountain-tops of man's spirit are smoking, but smoking 
because God has descended upon and touched them. 

These are but a few examples, brethren, — time will 
allow us to adduce no more, — of that which all Scripture 
will abundantly supply, — the evidences, namely, of its 
own adaptation for the needs of all, for all the needs 
of each. And these things being so, let us for our- 
selves gladly enter into this many-chambered palace of the 
Truth, whereof the doors stand open to us evermore. Let 
us thankfully sit down at this feast of many spiritual dain- 
ties, which is spread for us and for all. And if not every 
one of them at once delight us; if of some we have rather 
to take the word of others that they are good than as yet 
proved it so ourselves, let us believe that the cause of this 
lies rather in the sickness of our palate, than in the faulty 
preparation of that which the great Master of the feast has 
set before us ; — and let us ask, not that these be removed, 
but that our true taste be restored ; and this the more, see- 
ing that unnumbered guests, who in time past have sat 
down, or are now sitting down, at this heavenly banquet, 



56 LECTURE III. 

have borne witness that these meats which may be dull and 
tasteless to us, were life and strength to them, "yea, sweeter 
than honey and the honeycomb." We are sick, and these 
are medicines no less than food ; and for us that word must 
stand fast, Non corrigat ceger medicamenta sua. Let us 
thus bear ourselves towards Holy Scripture, and then pre- 
sently, in that which seemed a stranger face we shall recog- 
nize the countenance of a gracious, a familiar friend. We 
shall more and more see how this Scripture was laid 
out by One who knew what was in man, One who desired 
also to unfold us on all sides of our moral and spiritual 
being; who, too, in the largeness of his love, would send 
none empty away ; but who does herein open his hand, that 
He may fill all things living with his plenteousness. 



LECTURE IV. 

THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 

Hebrews I. 1, 2. 

God, tvho at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto 
the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by 
his Son. 

We have seen how in Holy Scripture one idea is domi- 
nant, the idea of a lost, defaced, and yet not wholly effaced, 
image of Grod in man, with G-od's scheme for its restoration 
and renewal : we have seen how that, which is one in having 
this for a subject, and in knowing no other subject, has yet 
a manifold development, marvellously corresponding to the 
manifold necessities of his nature to whom it is addressed, 
and who by its help should be renewed. But the progres- 
sive unfolding of God's plan in Scripture, may well afford 
matter for another discourse, and will supply our theme for 
this day. 

Nor shall I herein be wandering from my argument, since 
this progressiveness of Scripture is an important element 
in its fitness for the education of man. For this we claim 
of a teacher to whom we yield ourselves with an entire confi- 
dence, that there be advance and progress in his teaching j 
not indeed that this should be at every moment distinctly 
perceptible, but that it should be so when long periods and 
courses of his teaching are contemplated together. The 
advance may sometimes be rather in a spiral than in a 
straight line, yet still on the whole there must be ad- 
vance ; he must not eddy round in ceaseless circles, leaving 
off where he began, but evidently have a scheme before 
him, according to which he is seeking to lead on unto per- 

(57) 



58 LECTURE IV. 

fection those that have committed themselves to his teach- 
ing. It is of the essence of a true teacher, be that teacher 
book or person, thus to carry forward. If it be a book 
claiming to educate, it must be itself the history of an 
education, the record of an intensive, as well as extensive 
development. We look for this, and we rest our expecta- 
tion on a yet deeper feeling. We feel that as each indi- 
vidual man was meant to go on from lower to higher, and 
in the end to have Christ fully formed in him, so the 
Church as a living body could not have been intended to be 
a stationary thing, always conning over the same lessons, 
but rather advancing in a like manner to perfection ; — not 
in this advance leaving aught behind which God has taught 
it ; but ever carrying with it into its higher state, as part 
of its realized possession, all which it has gotten in a lower. 
And if so, that Book which was to be the record and inter- 
preter of these dealings of God, ever running parallel with 
them, growing with their growth, explaining them as they 
unfolded themselves, that must bear the stamp and impress 
of the same progress. 

Does a nearer examination of the Holy Scriptures bear 
out this our expectation ? Does it speak of itself as a pro- 
gressive revelation of the Name of God ? And if so, can we 
discern it to be such, to be the gradual unfolding of the 
ideas of the kingdom, and of men's relations to it, to be a 
continual calling out in them the sense of new relations 
and new faculties and powers ? I think, both. And, first, 
Revelation speaks of itself in such language. "I have 
many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them 
now;" surely this was what God had been saying to his 
elect from the first, till that crowning day of Pentecost, 
when they were made capable of all mysteries and had the 
unction of the Holy One, and knew all things ; — and with 
much before us, it needs not to tarry with the proofs of 
this. 



THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 



59 



And as regards ourselves, we can trace, I think, the 
Scripture to be this which it affirms itself to be. Who, for 
instance, can help feeling that in the three memorable epochs 
by which it marks the greatest unfoldings of the kingdom 
of God, — I mean, in the calling of Abraham, the giving 
of the Law by Moses, the Incarnation of the Son of G-od, 
— we have the childhood, the youth, the manhood of our 
race, of that elect portion of it, at least, which God had 
gathered into a Church and constituted for the while the 
representative of all ; and that we have this with marvel- 
lous correspondencies of these epochs to similar periods in 
the lives which we ourselves are living ? 

In Abraham and the Church of the patriarchal age, we 
have that which exactly answers to childhood. Their rela- 
tions to G-od were as a child's to a father, — the same un- 
doubting, unquestioning affiance ; with as yet no fixed code 
of law ; the deeper evils of the heart not as yet stirring, the 
awful consciousness of those evils as yet unawakened. So 
Abraham and the patriarchs walked before G-od, in the 
beauty and the simplicity of a childlike faith — love seeming 
as yet the only law, and no other law being needed, since 
not yet the whole might of the rebellious will had been 
aroused, since a sheltering Providence had hitherto kept 
aloof many temptations which should afterwards arrive. 

But a very different stage of man's history begins with 
Moses. The father is thrown for awhile into the background 
by the lawgiver; God appears the giver of a "fiery law." 
and the race having outgrown its childlike estate, with all 
the blessed privileges of that time, appears now as the youth, 
aware of this terrible law, and struggling against it ; and in 
this struggle brought to a consciousness of that which before 
was hidden from it, namely, the deep alienation of its will 
from the perfect will of God. This seems, at first sight, as 
though it were a retrograde step in man's progress, and 
regarded apart from the final issues it were ; as the Apostle 



60 LECTURE IV. 

himself confesses, when he says, " I was alive without the 
law once, but when the commandment came, sin revived, 
and I died." Yet not he, nor any, could have done without 
this coming in of the law. The opposition of his will to 
God's will being in man, most needful was it that it should 
not remain latent, but be brought out, yea brought out in 
all its strength, as a holy law could alone bring it out ; for 
thus only was it in the way of being subdued. God having 
made himself known as a God of love, most needful was it 
that men should know Him also the God of an absolute 
righteousness ; since without this that love itself had shown 
in men's eyes as a poor thing, as a weak toleration of their 
evil, instead of being, as it is, that which more than all else 
makes Him a consuming fire for all impurity and evil. 

But with the entering of the Son of God into our nature, 
the manhood of the race begins — that which it was meant in 
its final perfection to be — that, for the sake of which it 
passed through those lower stages. The consciousness of 
the filial relation has again revived in all its full strength, 
and the suspended privileges are restored. "Abba, Father !" 
is once more on the lips of the Church, only with deeper 
accents and a fuller sense than at that earlier day of all 
which in these words is included. The sense of God's love 
which belonged to its childhood, of God's righteousness 
which predominated in its youth, are reconciled ; they have 
met and kissed each other. His love is seen to be right- 
eous and his righteousness to be loving. His law is no 
longer struggled against, for it is written in the heart, 
and it reveals itself as that which to keep is the truest 
blessedness. 

And how mysteriously, brethren, does this teaching of 
our race, which was thus written large, and acted out upon 
a great scale in the history of God's chosen people, repeat 
itself evermore in the smaller world, in the microcosm of 
elect souls, which are under the same divine education. Is 



THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 61 

there not many a one who can trace in himself the same 
process and progress we have been following here ? First 
was our childhood, corresponding to Abraham's state — the 
undeveloped, yet true affiance on a heavenly Father, — when 
we needed no more than this ; when as yet we had not 
looked down into the abysmal deeps of evil in our hearts, 
when we too were alive without the law, and dreamt not of 
the rebel, who was ready, when occasion came, to take arms 
against his Lord, though that rebel was no other than our- 
selves. 

But the years went on, with all which they brought, 
with their good and with their evil : and childhood was 
left behind ; and to us, too, the time arrived for the giving 
of the law; and then us, too, God led apart into the 
wilderness, separated us from every other living soul, made 
us feel the mystery of our awful personality, and spoke 
to us as He had never spoken before, even face to face, 
— revealing Himself to us no longer merely as the God 
of our fathers, but with a higher revelation, as the I AM, 
the Holy One. For us, too, was that terrible giving of the 
law in the deep of our souls, which he who has known 
will say boldly, that Sinai with its blunders and lightnings, 
its blackness and its darkness, its unendurable voice which he 
who heard craved that he might hear no more, was not more 
terrible ; — and sin is no longer a word but a reality, is no 
longer felt as the transient grieving of a parent's heart, but 
as the violation of an eternal order, a violation which cannot 
remain unrevenged or unredressed. But dreadful as this 
law is, terrible and threatening shape as it rises over the 
soul, does not each man make the same experience as did 
Israel of old, and find out its helplessness for the true ends 
of his life ? It can kill the sinner, but it cannot kill the 
sin; that only shrinks deeper into its hiding-places in the 
soul, and needs another charmer to lure it out. This is our 
state of condemnation, which is yet most needful for a right 

6 



62 LECTURE IV. 

entering into the state of life and freedom : this is the law 
preparing for, and handing over unto, Christ. 

And as there was the manhood of the race, as the Church 
which God had been training and disciplining so long, was 
introduced into the fullness of its inheritance, when Christ, 
who had upheld it always, came visibly into the midst of it; 
so is it in like manner when God brings his First-begotten 
into the inner world of any single heart. Then that heart 
understands all the way by which it had been led, and sees 
how all things have worked for the bringing it into that 
grace in which now it stands. Then the child's faith re- 
turns ; only is it now a mightier faith, a more heroic act of 
affiance, for it is a faith in God despite of and in full know- 
ledge of our evil, instead of a faith in God in ignorance of 
our evil. 

Marvellously does He thus run oftentimes the lives of his 
children parallel with the life of the Church at large, as 
that life is unfolded in Sacred Writ, bringing each in par- 
ticular under the same teaching as the whole. Yet this is 
not all: we have not merely in Scripture God carrying 
Israel his Son through successive stages, which may serve to 
explain to us the stages *)f our own innermost spiritual life; 
but we may trace there another sequence, another progress 
— that by which He is training his people into a sense of 
ever-widening relationships, and this also making answer 
to the sequence in which He trains each one in particular of 
his children into the same, and serving as a pattern thereto. 
For what are the great fellowships of men, which rest not 
upon man's choice, but upon God's will, which are not self- 
willed associations into which men gather of themselves, but 
societies wherein they are set by the act of God? Each 
will at once reply, The Family, The State, The Church. 
And this too is their order ; The Family must go before the 
State, being itself the corner stone on which the State is 
built; and the State, which is the fellowship of certain men 



THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 63 

to the exclusion of others, waits to be taken up into the 
Church, which is the fellowship of all men who believe in 
the risen head of their race. 

And this sequence is that maintained in the Bible ; for 
what is the early history of the Bible, but predominantly the 
history of the Family ? of the blessing which awaits rever- 
ence for the family order, of the sure curse which avenges 
its violation. On the one side, we have the men who were 
true to this divine institute ; who, amid many weaknesses, 
recognized and honored it — the Seths and Enochs before the 
flood, the Abrahams and Isaacs, the Jacobs and Josephs 
after. On the other side we have the Lamechs and Tubal 
Cains, and at a later day, the builders of Babel, the men 
who thought to associate themselves, to say, a confederacy, 
where God had not said it, to knit themselves into a body 
by bands of their own, instead of owning that God had knit 
them already — skilled masters, as we learn, in the arts of 
life, starting up, as we are told, into a premature civiliza- 
tion; yet having in themselves, through violations, which 
we can plainly trace, of that family order, of the primal 
institutes of humanity, the seeds of a sure and swift decay : 
so that presently they are lost to our sight altogether ; while 
the Patriarchs, the honourers and sanctifiers of these rela- 
tions, walk before us heads of a nation, of that kingly and 
priestly nation in which all other nations should be blest. 

But Holy Scripture does not linger here. It passes on, 
and its middle history is the history of this nation, of national 
life ; showing us, by liveliest example, all that can exalt, all 
that can degrade, a people : how Israel, so long as it believed 
in its invisible Lord and King, its righteous Lawgiver, was 
great and prosperous— how, when it lost that faith and bowed 
to idols of sense, it became of a surety inwardly distracted, 
externally enslaved — forfeiting those very outward gifts for 
the sake of which it had turned its back upon the Giver — • 
righteousness and truth and justice perishing between man 



64 LECTURE IV. 

and man, while He in whom alone these have any sub- 
stantial existence was no longer held fast to and believed. 

And then in the New Testament, not the conditions under 
which the Family can exist, not the conditions under which 
the State, but the idea of the Church, of that fellowship, 
which, including all, may itself be included by none, is 
unfolded to us. There we behold the laws of the universal 
kingdom, and Christ, not the King of a single nation, but 
the Head of humanity, the Saviour of all. 

And this order of Sacred Scripture, is also the order of 
our lives. I mean not that we first become members of a 
family and then of a State, and lastly of a Church • but this 
is the order in which we become conscious of relations. For 
what is it that a child first discovers ? that it is the member 
of a family — that it has kindred. What are its earliest 
duties ? a faithful entering into these relations ; its earliest 
sins ? a refusal to enter into them. And what next ? that 
there is a wider fellowship than this of home-love and home- 
affections, to which it belongs ; that there are other men to 
whom it owes other duties; that it is the member of a 
State no less than a family, that it must be just as well as 
loving. And last of all is perceived that there is yet another 
fellowship at the root of both these fellowships, which gives 
them their meaning, which alone upholds and sustains them 
against all the sin and selfishness which are continually 
threatening their dissolution — a fellowship with the Lord of 
men, and in Him with every man of that race which He has 
redeemed, of that nature which He has taken. And so the 
cycle of God's teaching is complete, and that cycle in which 
the Scripture shows that He taught the world, is found here 
also again to be the cycle in which he teaches the individual 
soul. 

But to pass to quite another province of our subject : — 
we must not leave unobserved the manner in which prophecy 



'THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 65 

bears witness to this progressive unfolding of God's purpose 
with our race. Often we dishonour prophecy, when the 
chief value which it has in our eyes is the use to which it 
may be turned as evidence ; when we regard it as serving 
no nobler ends, as having no deeper root in the economy 
of God than in this are presumed ; when it is for us merely a 
miraculum scientice, which, with the miracles properly so 
called, the miracula potential, may do duty in proving 
against cavillers the divine origin of our Faith; when all 
that we can find is that the doers of the works and the 
utterers of the words did and said what was beyond the 
reach and scope of common men. But the fact that pro- 
phecy should constitute so large an element in scripture 
finds its explanation rather in that law which we have been 
tracing throughout all Scripture — the law, I mean, of an 
orderly development, according to which there is nothing 
sudden, nothing abrupt or unprepared in his counsels, all 
whose works are known to him from the beginning. It is 
part of this law that there should ever be prefigurations of 
the coming, that truths so vast and so mighty as those of 
the New Covenant, so difficult for man's heart to conceive, 
should have their way prepared, should, ere they arrive in 
their highest shape, give pledge and promise of themselves, 
in lower forms and in weaker rudiments. 

Thus was it good that before the appearance of the Son 
of God in the flesh, there should be, in the language of 
Bishop Bull, "preludings of the Incarnation," transient 
apparitions of Him in a human form, though not in the 
verity of our human nature. Thus was it ordered that 
each one of the mighty acts of our Lord's life should not 
stand wholly apart, and without analogy in any thing which 
had gone before, but ever find in something earlier its linea- 
ments and its outlines. Weak and faint these lineaments 
may have been, weak and faint they must have been, when 
compared with the glory that excellcth ; yet sketches and 

6* 



66 LECTURE IV. 

outlines and foreshadowings still of the glory to be revealed. 
Thus, more than one was wonderfully born, with many cir- 
cumstances of a strange solemnity, with heavenly announce- 
ments, with much that went beyond human expectation, ere 
He was born, by the annunciation of an Angel, through the 
overshadowing of the Holy Ghost, whose name should be 
called Wonderful, The Mighty God. So we may say that 
in the shining of Moses' face, as he came down from the 
mount of God, we have already a weaker Transfiguration, a 
feeble fore-announcement of that brightness which, not from 
without, but breaking forth from within, should clothe with 
a light which no words could adequately utter, not the face 
only, but the whole person, of the Son of God. So again, 
in the translation of Elijah, the lineaments of his Ascen- 
sion appear, who, not rapt in a chariot of fire, not needing 
the cleansing of that fiery baptism, nor requiring that com- 
missioned chariot to bear him up, did in the far sublimer 
calmness of his own indwelling power arise from the earth, 
and with his human body pass into the heavenly places.* 
And once more, in the dividing of the Spirit which Moses 
had, upon the seventy elders of Israel, so that they all did 
prophesy, we recognize an earlier though a weaker Pentecost ; 
in which, however, the later was surely implied : for if from 
the servant could be imparted of his spirit, how much more 
and in what larger measure from the Son ? All these should 
be contemplated as preparatory workings in a lower sphere 
of the same Spirit, which afterwards wrought more gloriously 

* Gregory the Great {Horn, in Evang. :) Elias in curru legitur 
ascendisse, ut videlicet aperte, demonstraretur, quia homo purus 
adjutorio indigebat alieno. Per angelos quippe facta et ostensa sunt 
adjumenta; quia nee in coelum quidem aerium per se ascendere 
poterat quern naturae suae infirmitas gravabat. Hederntor auteni 
noster non curru, non angelis sublevatus legitur quia is qui fecerat 
omnia, nimirum super omnia sua virtute ferebatur. 



THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 67 

in the later and crowning acts ; as knit to those later by an 
inner law, as sharers of the same organic life with them. 

The rending away of isolated passages, and then saying, 
This Psalm, or That chapter of Isaiah, is prophetic, and has 
to do with Christ and his kingdom, — and this without ex- 
plaining how it comes that these have to do, and those 
nearest them have not, can never truly satisfy ; men's minds 
resist this fragmentary capricious exposition. The portions 
of Scripture thus adduced very likely are those in which 
prophecy concentrates itself more than in any other : they 
may be the strongest expressions of that Spirit which 
quickens the whole mass ; but it has not forsaken the other 
portions to gather itself up exclusively in these. 

Rather the subtle threads of prophecy are woven through 
every part of the woof and texture, not separable from thence 
without rending and destroying the whole. All the Old 
Testament, as the record of a divine constitution pointing to 
- something higher than itself, administered by men who 
were ever looking beyond themselves to a Greater that 
should come, who were uttering, as the Spirit stirred them, 
the deepest longings of their souls after his appearing, is 
prophetic ; and this, not by an arbitrary appointment, which 
meant thus to supply evidences ready to hand for the truth of 
Revelation, in the curious tallying of the Old with the New, 
the remarkable fulfilments of the foretold, but prophetic 
according to the inmost necessities of the case, which would 
not suffer it to be otherwise. 

For how could God, bringing to pass what was good and 
true, do other than make it resemble what was best and truest, 
which he should one day bring to pass ? Raising up holy 
men, how could he avoid giving them features of likeness to 
the Holiest of all ? appointing them functions and offices in 
which to bless their brethren, how could these otherwise 
than anticipate his functions and his office, who should come 
in the fulness of blessing to his people ? Inspiring them to 



68 LECTURE IV. 

speak, stirring by the breath of his Spirit the deepest chords 
of their hearts how could He bring forth from them any 
other notes but those which made the deepest music of their 
lives ; their longings, namely, after the promised Redeemer, 
their yearnings after the kingdom of his righteousness, — 
mere longings and yearnings no longer now, since the Spirit 
that inspired such utterances, being the very Spirit of Truth, 
gave pledge, in sanctioning and working the desire, that the 
fulfilment of that desire in due time should not be wanting ? 
If the poet had right when he spake of 

" the prophetic soul 
Of the great world, dreaming of things to come ;" 

by how much higher reason must a prophetic soul have 
dwelt in Israel, by which it not vaguely dreamed, but 
in some sort felt itself already in possession, of the great 
things to come, whereof it knew that the seeds and germs 
were laid so deeply in its own bosom ? We may say of 
Judiasm, that it bore in its womb the Messiah, as the 
man-child whom it should one day give birth to, and only 
in the forming and bearing of whom it found its true 
meaning. This was its function, and according to the counsel 
of Gfod it should have been saved through this child-bearing ; 
though by its own sin it did itself expire in giving birth 
to Him who was intended to have been not its death but 
its life. 

This, then, is another remarkable aspect under which 
the progressiveness of God's dealings, and of that Book 
which is their record, presents itself to us — this long 
and patient training of his people through many a prece- 
ding word and institution and person into the capacity 
of recognising his glory, of whom all that went before 
was but the shadow and the s} r mbol. In all this was a 
preclude to prepare the spiritual ear for the full burst 
of a later, and but for that, an overwhelming harmony; 



THE ADVANCE OE SCRIPTURE. '69 

— a purpling of the east, which might tell in what quarter 
the Sun of Righteousness would appear, and whither the 
straining eyes must turn, that would catch the first brightness 
of his rising. 

Nor is it unworthy of observation, that prophecy did 
never run before that actual development, which alone would 
enable it to speak a language which men should understand. 
It did not paint upon air.; but ever claimed forms of the 
present in which to array its promises of the future. Thus 
we have no mention of Christ the Prophet till a great 
Prophet had actually arisen, till Moses could say, "The 
Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet like unto 
me." We hear nothing of Christ the King, till there were 
kings in Israel — theocratic kings — who should give the pro- 
phecy a substance and a meaning; who should make men 
know, though with many imperfections, what a sceptre of 
righteousness was, and a king ruling in judgment. And 
thus (did time allow) we might trace in much more detail 
how not only in the idea of type and prophecy there is 
obedience to that law of advance and progress, which we 
have every where been finding, but in the very order and 
sequence of the prophecies themselves. Yet this matter we 
must leave. Sufficient for us to have seen how prophecy are 
the outlines and lineaments which shall indicate, and fit men 
to know the very body of the Truth, when that at length 
shall come; — to have considered under another aspect to- 
day, how Scripture is its own witness, gives proof that it is 
what it affirms itself to be, a Book for the education of men, 
— in that it plainly contains the gradual unfolding of a great 
idea, such a thought as only could have entered into the 
mind of God to conceive, such a thought as He only who is 
the King of ages could have carried out. 

And without question, for ourselves, brethren, the lessons 
which the Scripture contemplated as this Book of an ever- 
advancing education may suggest, are not very far to seek. 



70 LECTURE TV. 

And this first. God has taken our whole race by the hand 
that He may lead it on together ; even so will he lead every 
single soul that will trust itself to Him. He will speak to 
us first as "little children/' then as "young men," and 
then as " fathers." His Word in our hearts shall be as the 
blade and the ear, and the full corn in the ear. He will 
give us, as we are faithful, an ever larger horizon, a widen- 
ing horizon of duty, with an increasing consciousness of 
powers and faculties for fulfilling that duty. 

And our second lesson lies also at the door, — that^seeing, 
as we do in Scripture, what the school has been in which 
all God's saints have been trained, we be well content to 
learn in the same, nor count that we can learn better in any 
other. The study of this Scripture shows us how, through 
the everlasting ordinances of the Family, the State, the 
Church, God trains into nobleness and freedom the souls 
and spirits of men ; how he calls out in their strength, first 
the affections, then the conscience, and last of all, the reason 
and the will of men. It teaches us that, not in self-willed 
separation from common duties, but in a lowly and earnest 
fulfilling of them, men have grown up to their full stature 
as men. Often in that evil pride which makes us rather to 
follow after that which will divide us from our brethren, 
that which will unite us to them, we have counted, it may 
be, that we could discipline ourselves better, that we could 
train ourselves higher, than by those common ways in which 
all our fellows are being trained, — better than through the 
ordinances of the family, better than through the duties 
which devolve on us as citizens, better than by the teach- 
ing and Sacraments of Christ's Church. It has seemed to 
us a poor thing to walk in those trite and common paths 
wherein all are walking. Yet these common paths are the 
paths in which blessing travels, are the ways in which God 
is met. Welcoming and fulfilling the lowliest duties which 
meet us there, we shall often be surprised to find that we 



THE ADVANCE OF SCRIPTURE. 71 

have unawares been welcoming and entertaining Angels; 
and nurturing ourselves upon these, it shall be with us in 
our souls and spirits as it was with Daniel and his young 
companions, when they showed fairer and better liking, and 
had more evidently thriven upon their common food, their 
ordinary pulse, than had all their compeers upon their 
royal dainties, their profane meat3 ; brought from the table 
of the Babylonian king. 



LECTURE V. 

THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OE SCRIPTURE. 

John XII. 16. 

These things understood not his disciples at the first ; but when Jesus was 
glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of him. 

The subject of the Lectures which I am now permitted 
to resume, is the fitness of Holy Scripture unfolding the 
spiritual life of men, and the arguments which we may from 
this fitness derive for its being the gift of God to his rea- 
sonable creatures, whom He has called to a spiritual fellow- 
ship with Himself. So many who are now present cannot 
have heard the earlier discourses, so little have I a right to 
expect that those who did, should vividly retain them in 
their memories, that I shall just mention at this resump- 
tion of the course the point at which I have arrived, not 
attempting to retrace even with hastiest steps, but indicating 
merely by lightest hints, the way by which we hitherto have 
gone. Passing by, then, the external arguments, not as 
comparatively unimportant, but as not belonging to the 
domain of my peculiar subject, I have sought, after some 
preliminary observations which filled the chief part of my 
first Lecture, in the second to trace the oneness of Scripture ; 
how there runs through it one idea, that of the kingdom of 
God, and how by that one are knit into unity its most 
diverse parts and elements ; in the third, how this Scripture, 
which is one, is also manifold, so laid out that it shall 
nourish all souls, and make wonderful answer to the moral 
and intellectual needs of all men ; and then in the fourth, 
the latest of that series, I endeavoured to show how Scrip- 
ture is fitted to be the Book of our education, the furtherer 
(72) 



THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 73 

of our spiritual growth, through itself being the history of 
the progressive education of our race into the fulness of the 
knowledge of God. 

An ample task remains for us still : this day's portion of 
that task will consist in an attempt, it must be indeed a 
most imperfect one, to show how this treasure of divine 
Truth, once given, has only gradually revealed itself; how 
the history of the Church, the difficulties, the trials, the 
struggles, the temptations in which it has been involved, 
have interpreted it to its own records, brought out their 
latent significance, and caused it to discover all which in 
them it had ; how there was much written for it there as in 
sympathetic ink, invisible for a season, yet ready to flash 
out in lines and characters of light, whenever the appointed 
day and hour had arrived. So that in this way the Scrip- 
ture has been to the Church as their garments to the chil- 
dren of Israel, which during all the years of their pilgrimage 
in the desert waxed not old, yea, according to rabbinnical 
tradition, kept pace and measure with their bodies, growing 
with their growth, fitting the man as they had fitted the 
child, and this, until the forty years of their sojourn in the 
wilderness, had expired. Or, to use another comparison 
which may help to illustrate our meaning, Holy Scripture 
thus progressively unfolding what it contains, might be 
likened fitly to some magnificent landscape on which the 
sun is gradually rising, and ever as it rises is bringing out 
one headland into light and prominence, and then another \ 
anon kindling the glory-smitten summit of some far moun- 
tain, and presently lighting up the recesses of some near 
valley which had hitherto abided in gloom, and so travel- 
ling on till nothing remains in shadow, no nook nor corner 
hid from the light and heat of it, but the whole prospect 
stands out in the clearness and splendour of the brightest 
noon. 

And we can discern, I think, in some measure, causes 



74 LECTURE V. 

which in the wisdom and providence of Glod worked together 
to constitute Scripture as this glorious landscape which 
should ever reveal new features of wonder and beauty, this 
boundless treasure with riches laid up for all future times 
and all future needs. The apostolic Church — that of which 
the sacred writings of the New Covenant are a living tran- 
script — was not merely one age and one aspect of the 
Church, but we have in it the picture and prophecy of the 
Church's history in every future age. All which in those 
after ages should only slowly declare itself, is there pre- 
sented in one great image, — the most amazing contrasts, the 
best and the worst, the highest and the lowest, the noblest 
assertions, and the deadliest perversions, of the Truth. It 
is, if we may so speak, a rapid rehearsal of the great drama 
of God's providence with His Church, which should after- 
wards be played out at leisure on the world's stage. Noth- 
ing, which was after to be, was not there; although, by the 
necessities of the case, all compressed and brought into 
narrowest compass, and, so to speak, all fore-shortened, and, 
as a picture of the future, wanting in perspective and in 
distance. But this glimpse once vouchsafed to us all, the 
wondrous picture dislimns and dissolves again ; that era in 
which were all other eras wrapped up, close, and the period 
of gradual development begins; but yet not this, before 
every error and the antidote of every error had been set 
down, every heresy which should afterwards display itself 
full-blown, had budded, and the witness against it had been 
clearly borne ; not till it had been seen how Jewish legality 
and heathen false liberty would equally seek to corrupt the 
Truth, and with what weapons both were to be encountered ; 
not till missions to the Jew and missions to the heathen 
had alike been founded, and the manner of conducting them 
been shown ; not till many Antichrists had rehearsed and 
prefigured the final one, and tried the faith of G-od's elect. 
And thus it was ordained that the canonical Scriptures, 



THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 75 

which seem to belong only to one age, should indeed belong 
to all ages; inasmuch as that age, that fruitful time, that 
middle point of the world's history, in which an old world 
died and a new world sprang to life, had the germs and 
rudiments of all other times within its bosom. 

It is this fact, — that the Holy Scripture contains within 
itself all treasures of wisdom and knowledge, but only 
renders up those treasures little by little, and as they are 
needed or asked for, — which justifies us in speaking of a 
development of doctrine in the Church, and explains much 
in her inner history that might else startle or perplex. But 
about this matter so much has lately been spoken, and 
another theory of the manner in which the Church unfolds 
her doctrine, looking at first sight the same as this, but at 
heart entirely different, has so diligently been put forth, — 
and that with purposes hostile to that sound form of faith 
and doctrine, which it is given us to maintain and defend, — 
that it might be worth our while to linger here for a little, 
and consider wherein the essential difference between the 
false theory and the true is to be found, and in what sense, 
and in what only, the Church may be said to develope her 
doctrine. It is familiar to many who have watched with 
interest the course of the controversies of our day, that 
those who have given up as hopeless the endeavour to find 
in Scripture, or in the practices or creeds of the early 
Church, evidence for the accretions with which they have 
overlaid the Truth, have shifted their ground, and taken up 
a position entirely new. True, they, have said, these addi- 
tions are not there, but they are the unfolding of the Truth 
which is there; they are but the producing of the line of 
Truth, the later numbers of a series, whereof the earlier in 
Scripture are given; they are necessary developments of 
doctrine, such as the Church has ever allowed to herself, 
and which will alone explain many of the appearances which 
she presents. 



76 LECTURE V. 

Now doubtless there is a true idea of Scriptural develop- 
ments, which has always been recognized, to which the great 
Fathers of the Church have set their seal ;* and it is this, 
that the Church, informed and quickened by the Spirit of 
God, more and more discovers what in Holy Scripture is 
given her ; but it is not this, that she unfolds by an inde- 
pendent power any thing farther therefrom. She has always 
possessed what she now possesses of doctrine and truth, only 
not always with the same distinctness of consciousness 
She has not added to her wealth, but she has become more 
and more aware of that wealth; her dowry has remained 
always the same, but that dowry was so rich and rare, that 
only little by little she has counted over and taken stock and 
inventory of her jewels. She has consolidated her doctrine, 
compelled thereto by the provocation of enemies, or induced 
to it by the growing sense of her own needs. She has 
bronght together utterances in Holy "Writ, and those which 
apart were comparatively barren, when thus married, when 
each had thus found its complement in the other, have been 
fruitful to her. Those which apart meant little to her, have 
been seen to mean much, when thus brought together and 
read each by the light of the other. In these senses she 
has enlarged her dominion, her dominion having become 
larger to her. 

And yet all this which she has laboriously won, she possessed 

* Thus Augustine {Enarr. in Ps. liv. 22:) Multa enim latebant 
in Scrip turis et quum prsecisi essent liEeretici, quasstionibus agita- 
verunt Ecclesiam Dei ; aperta sunt quae latebant, et intellecta, est 
voluntas Dei.... Num quid enim perfecte de Trinitate tractatum est 
antequarn oblatrarent, Ariani? numquid perfecte de poenitentibus 
tractatum est antequarn obsisterent Novatiani ? Sic non perfecte de 
baptismate tractatum est antequarn contradicerent foi'is positi 
rebaptizatores. Cf. Enarr. in Ps. lxvii. 31 ; and Confess., 1. 7, c. 
19. Improbatio hasreticorum facit eminere quid Ecclesia sentiat, et 
quid habeat sana doctrina. 



THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 77 

before implicitly though not explicitly , — even as the shut hand 
is as perfect a hand as the open ; or as our dominion in that 
huge island of the Pacific is as truly ours, and that region 
as vast in extent now, as it will be when every mountain 
and valley, every rivulet and bay, have been explored and 
laid down in our maps, and the flag of England has waved 
over them all. AH, for example, which the later Church 
slowly and through centuries defined upon this side and 
that, of the person of the Son of G-od — of the relation of his 
natures and the communication of their properties — of his 
divine will and his human, — all this the earliest had, yea 
and enjoyed, not having arrived at it by analytic process, 
not able, perhaps, as not needing, to lay it out with dialectic 
accuracy, but in total impression, in synthetic unity. She 
possessed it all, she lived in the might and in the glory of 
it j as is notably witnessed by the prophetic tact, if one may 
venture so to call that divine instinct, by which she rejected 
all which was alien to and would have disturbed the true 
evolution of her doctrine, even before she had fully elaborated 
that doctrine ; by which she refused to shut the door against 
herself; and even in matters which had not yet come before 
her for decision and definition, preserved the ground clear 
and open from all that would have embarrassed and ob- 
structed in the future. 

We do not object to, rather we fully acknowledge, the 
theory of the development of religious Truth so stated. 
•We no more object, than we do to a Nicene Creed follow- 
ing up and enlarging an Apostolic, which rather we gladly 
and thankfully receive as a rich addition to our heritage. 
But that Nieene creed in the same manner contains no new 
truths which the Church has added to her stock since the 
earlier was composed, though it may be some which she has 
brought out with more distinctness to herself and to her 
children, — as it contains broader and more accurately 
guarded statements of the old. But the essential in this 



78 LECTURE V. 

progress of Truth is, that the later is always as truly found 
in Scripture as the earlier — not as easy to discover, but 
when discovered, as much carrying with it its own evidence ; 
— and there, not in some obscure hint and germ, putting 
one in mind of an inverted pyramid, so small the foundation, 
so vast and overshadowing the superstructure — as for in- 
stance, the whole Papal system, which rests, as far as Scrip- 
ture is adduced in proof, on a single text — nor yet there in 
some passage which is equally capable of a thousand other 
turns as that given ; as, for example, when the worship of 
the Blessed Virgin is found prophesied and authorized in 
the Lord's answer to her at the marriage in Cana of Galilee. 

But with these limitations the scheme is altogether 
different from that which some of late have put forward, 
— different not in degree only, but in kind ; and it is that 
mere confusion of unlike things under like terms, which is 
so fruitful a source of errors in the world, to call by this 
same name that theory which, refusing the Scriptures as, 
first and last, authoritative in and limitary of the Truth, 
assumes that in the conrse of ages there was intended to be, 
not only the discovery of the Truth which is there, but also, 
by independent accretion and addition, the further growth 
of doctrine, besides what is there; which recognises such 
accretions, when they fall in with its own notions, for its 
legitimate outgrowths, and not, as indeed they are, for 
noxious misgrowths, of doctrine ; and which thus makes the 
Church from time to time the creator of new Truth, and not 
merely the guardian and definer and drawer out of the old. 
This is all that she assumes to be j whatever she proclaims, 
she has ever the consciousness that she is proclaiming it as 
the ancient Truth, as that which she has always borne in 
her bosom, however she may not have distinctly outspoken 
it till now; as part of the Truth once delivered to her, 
though, it may be ; not all at once apprehended by her. 

Thus was it felt in the ages long past of the Church ; 



THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. <9 

thus also was it at the Reformation ; for that too was an 
entering of the Church on a portion of the fulness of her 
heritage, on which she had not adequately entered before. 
It is hardly too much to say, that the Reformation called 
out from their hiding-places the Epistle to the Romans, the 
Epistle to the G-alatians, and generally the Epistles of St. 
Paul, which then became to the faithful all which they were 
intended to be. It is not, of course, implied that these were 
not read and studied and commented on before, or that much 
and varied profit was not drawn from them in every age, or 
that they had not been full of blessing for unnumbered 
souls. But with all this, men's eyes were holden, and had 
been for long, so that the innermost heart of them, the 
deepest significance, was not seen. For they were the needs 
of souls, the mighty anguish of men's spirits, which were 
the true interpreters of these portions of God's Word. 
When that vast and gorgeous fabric, the Papal Christendom 
of the middle ages, dissolved and went to pieces, — that 
which, as one contemplates it on its bright side or its dark, 
one is inclined to regard as a glorious realization, or an im- 
pious caricature, of the promised kingdom of Christ upon 
the earth ; — when the time arrived that men could no longer 
live by faith, that they were members of that great spiritual 
fellowship, (for it was felt now to be only the mockery of 
such ;) when each man said, " I too am a man, myself and 
no other, one by myself, with my own burden, my own sin, 
the inalienable mystery of my own being, which I cannot 
put off on another, and, as such, I must stand or fall; it 
helps me nothing to tell me that I belong to a glorious com- 
munity, in which saints have lived and doctors taught, 
wherein I am bound in closest fellowship with all the ages 
that are past ; this helps me nothing, unless I too, by my- 
self, am a healed man, with the deep wound of my own 
spirit healed, unless you show me how my own personal 
relations to Grod, which sin has utterly disturbed, may be 



80 LECTURE V. 

made firm and strong again ; — then, when men thus felt, 
where should they so naturally turn as to those portions of 
Scripture especially designed to furnish a response to this 
deep cry of the human heart, and which are occupied with 
setting forth a personal Deliverer from this personal sense 
of guilt and condemnation ? And not any thing else but 
this mighty agony of souls would have supplied the key of 
knowledge to the Epistles of St. Paul, which had remained 
otherwise to the faithful as written in a strange language, to 
be admired at a distance, but dealing with matters in which 
they had no very close concern. But with this preparation, 
and thus initiated by suffering, men came to them with inef- 
fable joy, as to springs in the desert, and found in them all 
after which their inmost spirits had yearned and thirsted the 
most. 

Thus at the Reformation the relations of every man to 
God, consequent on the Incarnation and death and resurrec- 
tion of the Son of God, were those for which the Church 
mainly contended ; — that those relations were perfect, — that 
by one oblation Christ had perfected for ever them that were 
sanctified, that nothing might come between God and the 
cleansed conscience of his children, to bring them nearer 
than they were brought already, — no pope, no work, no 
penance, — that all which pretended to intrude and come be- 
tween was a lie. And by consequence those records of 
Scripture which were occupied with declaring the perfectness 
of these relations, were those most sedulously and most 
earnestly handled; bright beams of light flashed out from 
them, at once enlightening and gladdening and kindling, as 
they had never done until now. 

But in our own day, as we see in that country where alone 
a speculative philosophy, with which theology has to put 
itself in relation, exists, the controversy has drawn, as was 
to be looked for, even nearer yet to the very heart of the 
matter. For now it is not, What is the meaning for us of 



THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 81 

this constitution in the Son ? but whether there is such a 
constitution at all ? it is not what follows on the relations 
which the Incarnate Word established between God and 
men, but whether there have been any such relations at all 
established — any meeting of heaven and earth in the person 
of Jesus of Nazareth, — whether all which has been spoken 
of such has not been merely dreams of men, and not, as the 
Church affirms, facts of God ? And therefore the Gospels, 
as we see, come mainly into consideration now; round them 
the combatants gather, the battle rages : they are felt to be 
the key of the position, which as it is won or lost, will carry 
with it the issues of the day. Every one that would strike 
a blow at Christianity, strikes at them ; criticizes the record 
or the fact recorded; — the record, that it is a loose and 
accidental aggregation of floating materials, of insecure tra- 
ditions, which crumbles to pieces at any accurate handling 
— or the fact recorded, that a man who was God, and God 
who was man, is inconceivable, and carries its own contra- 
diction on its front. 

And as the Gospels are the point mainly assailed, so are 
they the citadel in which they must make themselves strong, 
from which they must issue, who would win in our day any 
signal victory for the Truth. First, the record itself must 
be vindicated, the glory and perfectness of its form, the 
mystery of those four Gospels in their subtle harmonies, in 
the manner wherein they complete one another, handing us 
on, the first to the second, and the second to the third, and 
the third to the last : — the wondrous laws of selection, and 
laws of rejection, which evidently presided at their construc- 
tion, and do continually reveal themselves to the deeper in- 
quirer, however the shallow may miss or deny them. And 
then, secondly, the facts, or, to speak more truly, the fact 
must be justified, which in those Gospels is recorded, — that 
it is the highest wisdom, — that a Son of God, who is also 
the Son of man, is the one, the divine fact, which alone ex- 



82 LECTURE V. 

plains either God or man, — is that which philosophy must 
end by accepting at the hands of Theology as the crowning 
Truth, and only in accepting which it will find its own com- 
pletion, and the long and weary strife between the two 
obtain an end. 

And as it was at the Reformation with the Pauline Epis- 
tles, — as it is now with the Gospels, — so, I cannot doubt, a 
day will come when all the significance of the Apocalypse 
for the church of God will be apparent, which hitherto it 
can scarcely be said to have been ; that a time will arrive 
when it will be plainly shown how costly a gift, yea rather, 
how necessary an armour was this for the Church of the 
redeemed. Then, when the last things are about to be, and 
the trumpet of the last Angel to sound, when the great 
drama is hastening with ever briefer pauses to its catastrophe, 
— then, in one unlooked for way or another, the veil will be 
lifted up from this wondrous Book, and it will be to the 
Church collectively, what, even partially understood, it has 
been already to tens of thousands of her children — strength 
in the fires, giving her "songs in the night,"- songs of joy 
and deliverance in that darkest night of her trial, which 
shall precede the break of her everlasting day ; and enabling 
her, even when the triumph of Antichrist is at the highest, 
to look securely on to his near doom and her own perfect 
victory. 

But we are dealing to-day with the past development of 
Scripture, not with the future — with what it has already 
unfolded, not with what it may have still in reserve. That 
may well occupy us hereafter ; for the present, let us ask 
ourselves what is the great lesson which we should draw 
from this aspect of the subject which we have been this day 
contemplating. A lesson surely of the very deepest signifi- 
cance. For if other generations before us have had their 
especial task and work, so also must we ; a work which none 
other have done for us, even as none other could; for just 



THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 83 

as each individual has some task which none other can fulfil 
so well as he, for it is his task, so every generation has its 
own appointed labour, and only can be at harmony with 
itself, when it has faithfully girded itself to that. Let us 
not then, under show of humility, flatter our indolence, and 
say that in this matter of the treasures of the knowledge of 
God all is searched out; that for us it remains only to live 
on the handed down, on that which others have already won 
from his Word. Let us not, in this manner, turn that into 
a standing pool or reservoir, which might be a spring of 
water springing up as freshly and newly to our lips as to the 
lips of any who have gone before us. 

Shall we determine, for instance, to know no other Theo- 
logy, no other results of Scripture, save those of the Church 
of the first ages ? Are we thus honouring Christ's promise 
to His Church, when we imply, as so we do, that the Spirit 
of wisdom and understanding was given to her once, but is 
not given to her always ? Shall all history, as an interpreter 
of God's Word, go for nothing with us — be assumed to stand 
in no relation to that Book, of which surely the very idea 
is, that as it casts light upon all, so it receives light from 
all ? Or do we presume too far in believing that there are 
portions of its vast and goodly field, which we can cultivate 
with larger success than those who preceded us, to which we 
shall bring experience which they did not and could not 
bring, which will yield therefore to us ampler returns than 
they yielded to them ? 

Or, again, were it not as great a mistake, as partial a view 
upon another side, to require that the Theology of the Ee- 
formation should be the ultimate term and law to us, — to 
say that we would know nothing further, and to look, 
respectfully it may be, but still coldly, on any truths which 
were not at that day counted vital ? Surely our loss were 
most real, refusing to take our part in cultivating this field 
which the Lord has blest, and which he has now delivered 



84 LECTURE V. 

to us, that we in our turn might dress and keep, and enrich 
ourselves from it ;— a loss we know not how great ! for we 
too, had we been faithful and earnest, might have found hid 
in that field some treasure, for joy whereof we should have 
been ready to renounce all that we had, all our barren theo- 
ries, and hungry speculations, and mutual suspicions, if only 
we might have made that treasure our own ; so reconciling, 
so evidently fitted would it have shown itself for all our 
actual needs. 

We may purpose indeed to live on what others have done, 
the mighty men of the days which are past, the fathers or 
revivers of our faith ; and we may count that their gains 
will as much enrich us as they enriched them. But this 
will not prove so indeed ; for it is a just law of our being, 
one of the righteous compensations of toil, that what a man 
wins by his labour, be it inward truth, or only some outward 
suppliance of his need, is ever far more really his own, makes 
him far more truly rich, than aught which he receives or 
inherits ready made at the hands and from the toils of others. 
And they of whom we speak earned their truths, by toil and 
by struggle, by mighty wrestlings till the day broke ; water- 
ing with the sweat of their brow, oftentimes with tears as of 
blood — yea, with the life-blood of their own hearts, the soil 
which yielded them in return a harvest so large. So was it, 
and so only, that they came again with joy, bearing their 
sheaves with them. And would we do the same, let us first 
indeed see that we let nothing go — that we forfeit no part 
of that which we inherit at their hands. But also with a 
just confidence in that blessed Spirit, who is ever with His 
Church, who is ever leading it into the Truth which it 
needs, — let us labour, that through prayer and through 
study, through earnest knocking, through holy living, that 
inexhausted and inexhaustible Word may render up unto 
us our truth, — the truth by which we must live, — the truth, 
whatsoever that be, which, more than any other, will deliver 



THE PAST DEVELOPMENT OP SCRIPTURE. 85 

its from the lies with which we in our time are beset, which 
will make us strong where we are weak, and heal us where 
we are divided, and enable us most effectually to do that- 
work which our God would have done by us in this the day 
of our toil. 



LECTURE VI. 

THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 

Isaiah XII. 3. 

With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation. 

It was my endeavour in my last Lecture to bring before 
you the progressive unfolding of the Scripture for the 
Church — the manner in which for the company of faithful 
men in all ages, considered as one great organic body with 
one common life, there has been such a lifting up of veil 
after veil from the "Word of Grod ; they only gradually 
coming into the knowledge of all the riches which in that 
Word were their own. It were a worthy task for us to-day 
to consider, what no doubt all of us must often have felt, 
the way in which it has been ordained that the treasures of 
Holy Scripture should for the individual believer be inex- 
haustible also, — should be quarries in which he may always 
dig, yet which he can never dig out, — a world of wisdom 
in which the most zealous and successful searcher shall ever 
be the readiest to acknowledge that what remains to know 
is far more than what yet he has known. 

For this is a most important need for a Book such as we 
affirm the Bible to be, a Book for the cultivating of huma- 
nity, for the developing, by the ministry of the Church, 
through the teaching of the Spirit, the higher life of every 
man in the world. It belongs to the very primal necessities 
of a Scripture which is ordained for such ends as these, that 
it should be thus inexhaustible ; — that no man should ever 
come to its end, himself containing it, instead of being con- 
tained bv it, as by something far larger than himself. The 
(86) 



THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OP SCRIPTURE. 87 

very idea of such a Book, which is for all men and for all 
the life of every man, is that it should have treasures which 
it does not give up at once, secrets which it yields slowly 
and only to those that are its intimates ; with rich waving 
harvests on its surface, but with precious veins of metal hid- 
den far below, and to be reached only by search and by labour. 
Nothing were so fatal to its lasting influence, to the high 
purposes which it is meant to serve, as for any with justice 
to feel that he had used it up, that he had worked it through, 
that henceforward it had no "fresh fields/' nor " pastures 
new," in which to invite him for to-morrow. Even where 
this did not utterly repel him, where he maintained the 
study of this Book as a commanded duty, his chiefest delight 
and satisfaction in the handling of it would have departed ; 
he no longer would draw water with joy from these wells of 
salvation, for they would be to him fresh springing wells no 
more. 

It will be my purpose on the present occasion to trace, as 
far as I may, what there is^in the structure and conforma- 
tion of Scripture to constitute it this Book of unsearchable 
riches for each ; and in so doing I shall Dot, as might per- 
haps at first sight appear, be going over again the subject 
which was treated last; for that was the organic unfolding 
of the Word for the Church considered as a whole ; this the 
wealth which .there is stored for each one of the faithful in 
particular, and which all, given to him in his Baptism, he 
yet only little by little can make his own, appropriating and 
transmuting it into the substance of his own life. 

Now the first provision made for this by the grace and 
wisdom of Grod, — the first at least which I would note, — is 
one which by shallow or malignant objectors has been often 
turned into a charge against it, I mean the absence of a sys- 
tematic arrangement; for such is the shape which the com- 
plaint generally assumes. But this complaint of the want 
of method in Scripture, what is it in fact but this, that it is 



88 LECTURE VI. 

not dead, but living ? that it is no lierharium, no hortus sic- 
cus, but a garden ? a wilderness, if men choose to call it so, 
but a wilderness of sweets, with its flowers upon their stalks 
— its plants freshly growing, the dew upon their leaves, the 
mould about their roots — with its lowly hyssops and its cedars 
of God. And when men say that there is a want of method 
in it, they would speak more accurately if they said that 
there was a want of system ; for the highest method, even 
the method of the Spirit, may reign where system there is 
none. Method is divine, is inseparable from the ideas of 
God and of order; but system is of man, is a help to the 
weakness of his faculties, - is the artificial arrangement by 
which he brings within his limited ken that which in no 
other way he would be able to grasp as a whole. That there 
should be books of systematic Theology — books with their 
plan and scheme thus lying on their very surface, and meet- 
ing us at once — this is most needful ; but most needful also 
that Scripture should not be such a book. The dearest in- 
terests of all, of wise men equally as of women and children, 
demand this. 

It is true that one of the latest assaults on Scripture by a 
living adversary of the faith, by one who, at first attacking 
only the historical accuracy of the Gospels, has since gone 
rapidly the downward way, till he has sunk at last, as his 
latest writings testify, into the bottomless pit of sheerest 
atheism,* — it is true that his assault is mainly directed 
against this very point. He demands of a book, which 
claims to be the appointed book for the guidance and teach- 
ing of humanity, that he should be able to lay his finger 
there upon a precept or a doctrine for each occurring need, 
— that he should be able to find in one place and under one 
head all which relates to one matter ; and because he cannot 



* Strauss. Compare his Leben Jesu with his Christliche Glauben- 
slehre. 



THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 89 

find this in the Bible, he opens his mouth against it, and 
proclaims it insufficient for the ends which it professes to 
fulfill. But Holy Scripture is not this book for the slothful 
— is not this book which can be interpreted without, and 
apart from, and by the deniers of, that Holy Spirit by whom 
it came. Bather is it a field, upon the surface of which if 
sometimes we gather manna, easily and without labor, and 
given, as it were, freely to our hands, yet of which also many 
portions are to be cultivated with pains and toil, ere they 
will yield food for the use of man. This bread of life also 
is to be often eaten in the wholesome sweat of our brow. 

It is not a defect in Scripture, it is not something which 
is to be excused and explained away, but rather a glory and 
a prerogative, that there reigns in it the freedom and fulness 
of nature, and not the narrowness and strictness of art; — as 
one said of old who adorned this University, and is yet 
numbered among the honored band of the Cambridge Pla- 
tonists, when speaking of the delightful exercise of the 
highest faculties of the soul, which is thus secured : " All 
which gratulations of the soul in her successful pursuits of 
divine Truth would be utterly lost or prevented, if the Holy 
Scripture set down all things so fully and methodically that 
our reading and understanding would every where keep pace 
together. Wherefore, that the mind of man may be worthily 
employed, and taken up with a kind of spiritual husbandry, 
God has not made the Scriptures like an artificial garden, 
wherein the walks are plain and regular, the plants sorted 
and set in order, the fruits ripe and the flowers blown, and 
all things fully exposed to our view ; but rather like an un- 
cultivated field, where indeed we have the ground and hidden 
seeds of all precious things, but nothing can be brought to 
any great beauty, order, fulness, or maturity, without our 
industry, — nor indeed with it, unless the dew of his grace 
descend upon it, without whose blessing this spiritual culture 



90 LECTURE VI. 

will thrive as little as the labour of the husbandman without 
showers of rain."* 

But to pass to another branch of the subject ; — it is part 
of this absence of system, with the presence in its stead of a 
higher method, of this constitution of Scripture as a Book which 
no man should ever search to the end, and then be tempted 
to lay aside as known and finished, that so much of it should 
be occupied with the history of lives. That which is to 
teach us to live, is itself life — not precepts, not rules alone, 
but these clothing themselves in the flesh and blood of action 
and of suffering. A system of faith and duty, however in- 
tricate, one might come to the end of at last. One might 
possess thoroughly a Summa Theologioe, however massive 
and piled up ; for after all, however vast, it yet has its de- 
fined bounds and limits. But life stretches out on every side, 
and on every side loses itself in the infinite. An Abraham, 
a David, a Paul — there is always something incomplete in 
the way in which we have hitherto realized their characters ; 
they always abide greater than our conception of them, and 
at the same time always ready to reveal themselves in some 
new features to the loving and studious eye. Beheld in some 
new combination, in some new grouping with those by whom 
they are surrounded, they will yield some lesson of instruc- 
tion which they have never yielded before. And if they, 
how much more He, whom we are bidden above all to con- 
sider, looking unto whom we are to run our course, and 
whose every turn and gesture and tone and word are signifi- 
cant for us. We might study out a system ; but how can 

* Henry More, in his Mystery of Godliness, B. I., c. 2. Another 
in our own day has expressed himself in a like manner: " Scripture 
cannot, as it were, be mapped, or its contents catalogued ; but after 
all our diligence to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church, 
it must be an unexplored and unsubdued land, with heights and 
valleys, forests and streams, on the right and left of our path, and 
close about us, full of concealed wonders and choice treasures." 



THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 91 

we ever study out a person? And our blessedness is, that 
Christ does not declare to us a system, and say, " This is 
the truth ;" so doing he might have established a school : 
but he points to a person, even to himself, and says, " I am 
the Truth," and thus he founded, not a school, but a Church, 
a fellowship which stands in its faith upon a person, not in 
its tenure of a doctrine, or, at least, only mediately and in a 
secondary sense upon this. 

But another reason why the Word of God should be for 
us this mine which shall never be worked out, is, no doubt, 
the following : — that our own life brings out in it such new 
and undreamt of treasures. What an interpreter of Scrip- 
ture is affliction ! how many stars in its heaven shine out 
brightly in the night of sorrow or of pain, which were un- 
perceived or overlooked in the garish days of our prosperity. 
What an enlarger of Scripture is any other outer or inner 
event, which stirs the deeps of our hearts, which touches us 
near to the core and centre of our lives. Trouble of spirit, 
condemnation of conscience, pain of body, sudden danger, 
stroug temptation — when any of these overtake us, what 
veils do they take away, that we may see what hitherto we 
saw not; what new domains of G-od's word do they bring 
within our spritual ken ! How do promises, which once fell 
flat upon our ears, become precious now; psalms become our 
own, our heritage for ever, which before were aloof from us ! 
How do we see things now with the eye, which, before, we 
knew only by the hearing of the ear : which, before, men 
had told us, but now we ourselves have found ! How much, 
again, do we see in our riper age, which in- youth we missed 
or passed over ! And thus, on these accounts also, the Scrip- 
ture is well fitted to be our companion, and do us good, all 
the years of our life.* 

* Fuller. "The same man at several times may in his apprehen- 
sion prefer several Scriptures as best, formerly most affected with 
one place, for the present more delighted with another; and after- 



92 LECTURE VI. 

Another provision which in it is made for awakening 
attention, and for summoning men to penetrate more deeply 
into its meaning, is to be found in its apparent, I need not 
say only apparent, contradictions. But it is not at pains to 
avoid the semblance of these. It is not careful to remove 
every handle or objection which any might take hold of. 
On the contrary, that saying, " Blessed is he whosoever 
shall not be offended in me," finds as true an application to 
Christ's Word as to his person. For that Word goes on its 
way, not obviating every possible misconception, not giving 
anxious pains to show how this statement which it makes 
and that agree. It is satisfied that they do agree, and lets 
those that are watching for an offence take it. They whose 
hearts were already alienated from the Truth are suffered to 
stumble at this stone, which was set for this very fall and 
rise of many, that the thoughts of many hearts might be 
revealed, and that they who were longing for an excuse for 
unbelief might find one. 

And with the same challenge to the false-hearted, the 
same fruitful supply of suggestive thought for the devout 
inquirer, these matters claiming reconciliation will meet us, 
not in the history only, but also in the doctrine. For it is 
ever the manner of that Word with which we have to do, 
now boldly to declare its truth upon this side, and then pre- 
sently to declare it as boldly and fearlessly on the other — 
not painfully and nicely balancing, limiting, qualifying, till 
the whole strength of its statements had evaporated, not 
caring even though its truths should seem to jostle one 
another. Enough that they do not do so indeed. It is con- 



wards conceiving comfort therein not so clear, choose other places as 
more pregnant and pertinent to his purpose. Thus God orders it 
that divers men, (and perhaps the same man at divers time) make 
use of all his gifts, gleaning and gathering comfort, as it is scattered 
through the whole field of Scripture." 



THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 93 

tent to leave them to the Spirit to adjust and reconcile, and 
to show how the rights of each are compatible with the 
rights of the other — and not compatible only, but how most 
often the one requires that the other have its rights, before 
it can have truly its own. Thus how profitable for us that 
we have the divers statements of St. Paul and St. James — 
divers, but not diverse — each, in the words of St. Chrysos- 
tom, declaring the same truth, Sta^opcoj, but not tvavtiu>$ — 
how do they summon us to a deeper entering into the doc- 
trine than might otherwise have been ours, bidding us not 
to be satisfied till we reach that central point where we can 
evidently see how the two are at one, and do but present, 
from different points of view, the same truth. How useful 
to find in one place that God tempted Abraham, and in 
another, that God tempteth not any.* Should we have 
learned so well the significance of temptation, should we have 
been set to think about it so effectually by any other pro- 
cess ? Or when the Lord sets before the pure-hearted, that 
they shall see God, that God whom his Apostle declares that 
no man hath seen nor can see,f how does this set us to me- 
ditate on that awful yet blessed vision of God, which in 
some sense shall be vouchsafed to his servants, even as in 
some it shall remain incommunicable even unto them. 

If indeed these difficulties had been artificially contrived, 
if they had been puzzles and perplexities with which the 
Bible had been sown, that it might last us the longer, that 
in the explaining and reconciling of them we might find 
pleasant exercise for our faculties, they would be but of 
slightest value. But they grow out of a far deeper root 
than this ; they have nothing thus forced and unnatural 
about them. Bather is it here as in the kingdom of nature. 
How often does nature seem to contradict herself, so beck- 



* Compare Gen. xxii. 1, with Jam. i. 13. 
f Compare Matt v. 8, with 1 Tim. vi. 16. 



94 LECTURE VI. 

oning us onward to deeper investigations, till we shall have 
reached some higher and more comprehensive law, in which 
her seeming contradictions, those which lie upon her surface, 
are atoned. And this because she is infinite ; for it is of the 
essence of manifold and endless life that it should at times 
thus present itself as at variance with its own self. It is the 
glory of Scripture that its harmonies lie deep, so deep, that 
to the careless or perverse ear they may be sometimes mis- 
taken for discords. There might have been a consistency 
of its different parts — a poor and shallow thing — lying on 
the outside, traced easily and at once, which none could 
miss ; but such had been of no value, had been charged 
with no deeper instruction for us. 

To look, on another side, at the manner in which Holy 
Scripture presents itself as this inexhaustible treasure, — 
what riches are contained in its minutest portions ! As it 
can bear to be looked at in its largest aspect, so it challenges 
the contemplation of its smallest details — in this again like 
nature, which shows more wonderful, the more microscopic 
the investigation to which it is submitted. Here truly are 
maxima in minimis — the sun reflecting itself as faithfully 
in the tiny dewdrop, as in the great mirror of the ocean. 
The most eminent illustrations of this widest wealth laid up 
in narrowest compass must naturally be found in single say- 
ings of our Lord's. How do they shine, like finely polished 
diamonds, upon every face ! how simple and yet how deep ! 
apparent paradoxes, and yet profoundest truths ! Every one 
can get something from them, and no one can get all. He 
that gathers little has enough, and he that gathers much has 
nothing over : every one gathers there according to his eat- 
ing.* For example, " Whosoever will save his life shall 

* Augustine (Enarr. in Ps. ciii.) making spiritual application of 
the words, " All beasts of the field drink thereof," (Ps. civ. 11,) to 
the streams of Holy Scripture, beautifully says : Inde bibit lepus, 



THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 95 

lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall 
find it ;" — who sees not that in these words the keys of 
heaven and of hell are put into his hands ? and yet who will 
venture to affirm that he has come to their end ? that he has 
dived down into all their deeps, or that he ever expects to 
do so ? that he has made altogether his own the mysteries 
of life and of death which are here ? Or again, " Every 
one that exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that hum- 
bleth himself shall be exalted ?' — what is all the history of 
the world, if read aright, but a comment on, and a confirma- 
tion of, these words ? In the light of them what vast pages 
of men's destinies, of our own lives, become clear ! Even 
the sceptic Bayle was compelled to call them an abridgement 
of all human history ; and such they are, setting us as they 
do at the very centre of the moral oscillation of the world. 
These examples of that, whereof hundreds might be ad- 
duced, must suffice. 

Nor is it only what Scripture says, but its very silence, 
which is instructive for us. It was said by one wise man 
of another, that more might be learned from his questions 
than from another man's answers. With yet higher truth 
might it be said that the silence of Scripture is oftentimes 
more instructive than the speech of other books ; so that it 



in de onager: lepus parvus et onager magnus ; lepus timidus, et 
onager ferus, uterque inde bibit, sed quisque in sitim mam. Non 
dicit aqua, Lepori sufficio et repellit onagrum: neque hoc dicit, 
Onager accedat, lepus si accesserit, rapietur. Tarn fideliter et tem- 
perate fluit, ut sic onagrum satiet ne leporem terreat. Sonat stre- 
pitus vocis Tulliange, Cicero legitur, aliquis liber est, dialogus ejus 
est, sive ipsius sive Platonis, seu cujuscumque talium : audiunt im- 
periti, infirmi minoris cordis, quis audet illuc aspirare ? Strepitus 
aquae et forte turbatse, certe tamen tarn rapaciterfluentis, ut animal 
timidum non audeat accedere et bibere. Cui sonuit, In principio 
fecit Deus ccelum et terram, et non ausus est bibere ? Cui sonat 
Psalmus, et dicat, Multum est ad me ? 



96 LECTURE VI. 

has been likened to "a dial in which the shadow as well as 
the light informs us."* For example of this, how full of 
meaning to us that we have nothing told us of the life of 
our blessed Lord between the twelfth and the thirtieth years 
— how significant the absolute silence which the Gospels 
maintain concerning all that period ; that those years in fact 
have no history, nothing for the sacred writers to record. 
How much is implied herein ! the calm ripening of his hu- 
man powers, — the contentedness to wait, — the long prepara- 
tion in secret, before he began his open ministry. What a 
testimony is here, if we will note it aright, against all our 
striving and snatching at hasty results, our impatience, our 
desire to glitter before the world; against all which tempts 
so many to pluck the unripe fruits of their minds, and to 
turn that into the season of a stunted and premature harvest, 
which should have been the season of patient sowing, of an 
earnest culture and a silent ripening of their powers. 

How pregnant with meaning may that be which appears 
at first sight only an accidental omission ! Such an acci- 
dental omission it might at first sight appear that the Prodi 
gal, who while yet in a far country had determined, among 
other things* which he would say to his father, to say, "Make 
me as one of thy hired servants/' when he reaches his fath- 
er's feet, when he hangs on his father's neck, says all the 
rest which he had determined, but says not this.f We 
might take this, at first, for a fortuitous omission ; but in- 
deed what deep things are taught us here ! This desire to 
be made as a hired servant, this wish to be kept at a certain 
distance, this refusal to reclaim the fulness of a child's 

* Boyle (Style of Holy Scripture :) "There is such fulness in that 
book, that oftentimes it says much by saying nothing ; and not only 
its expressions, but its silences are teaching, like a dial in which 
the shadow as well as the light informs us." 

f Compare in Luke xv. ver. 19 and 21. 



THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 97 

privileges, was the one turbid and troubled element in his 
repentance. How instructive then its omission ; — that, say- 
ing all else which he had meditated, he yet says not this. 
What a lesson for every penitent, — in other words, for every 
man. We may learn from this wherein the true growth in 
faith and in humility consists — how he that has grown in 
these can endure to be fully and freely blest — to accept all, 
even when he most strongly feels that he has forfeited all; 
that only pride and the surviving workings of self-righteous 
ness and evil stand in the way of a reclaiming of every 
blessing, which the sinner had lost, but which God is waiting 
and willing to restore. 

Many other of the apparent accidents of Scripture, on 
what deep grounds do they rest ! Thus, for example, in the 
history of Pharaoh's trial, that God should ten times be 
said to have hardened his heart, and he ten times to have 
hardened his own, or to have had it hardened, without any 
reference to other than himself. The least attentive reader 
will scarcely have failed to observe this hardening attributed 
sometimes to God, and, sometimes, more or less directly, 
traced to the king's own willfulness and pride. But in the 
history of that great strife between the will of God and the 
will of his creature, in this the pattern history of that strug- 
gle, such exactly equal distribution of the language which 
assumes the freedom of man's will, and that which assumes 
the ultimate lordship of God over the course of the world — 
a lordship which even the resistance of the wicked does not 
derange or impugn — this exactly equal distribution of either 
language is surely most remarkable. The great, however 
mysterious, fact of the freedom of man's will going hand in 
hand with the sovereignty of God is not put in question by 
an exclusive use of a language resting on or assuming one 
of these truths or the other — nay rather, exactly equal rights 
are given to them both; for both are true, both of para- 
mount importance to be affirmed. The sinner does harden 

9 



98 LECTURE VI. 

his own heart; his resistance to God is most real; and yet 
there is a sense, a most true sense also, in which God har- 
dens it ; for, to use the old distinction, He who is not the 
auctor is yet the dispositor malorum — determines that the 
evil of the sinner shall break out in this form or in that, 
works even the dark threads of that resistance into the woof 
of providence which He is weaving; and as Solomon, in 
Jewish legend, compelled the wicked spirits to assist in the 
temple which he was building, so does God compel even his 
enemies, and them, when they are striving most fiercely 
against Him, to do his work, though they mean not so, and 
to contribute their stones to that heavenly temple of which 
He is the builder and the maker. 

Neither let us leave out of sight, when we are taking into 
account the provision which Scripture makes for nourishing 
the faithful in all the stages of their spiritual life and growth, 
that infinite condescension, according to which, like the 
prophet who made himself small, that he might stretch him- 
self, limb for limb, upon the dead child, it, in some sort, 
contracts itself to our littleness,* that we, in return, may be- 
come able to expand ourselves to its greatness. We see 
this gracious condescension in nothing more strongly than 
in that teaching by parables and similitudes, which there 
occupies so prominent a place. No one ttirns away from 
them in pride, as too childish ; none retreat from them in 
despair, as too high. In the parable the truth of God is 
not sought to be transplanted, as a full-grown tree, into our 
minds ; for, as such, it would never take root and flourish ; 
we never could find room for it there. But it comes first as 
a seed, a germ — small to the small, but with capacities of 
indefinite expansion ; it grows with our growth, enlarging 

* Or as one said in the middle ages ; Tota sacra Scriptura loqui- 
tur nobis tanquam balbutiendo, sicut mater balbutiens cum filio suo 
parvulo, qui, aliter non potest intelligere verba ejus. 



THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF SCRIPTURE. 99 

the mind which receives it to something of its own dimen- 
sions. Little by little the image reveals itself more fully ) 
gome of its fitnesses are perceived at once, and more and 
more, as spiritual insight advances; all of them perhaps 
never, lying as they do so deep, and having their roots in 
the mind of God, who has constituted this outward world 
to be an exponent of the inner, a garment of mysterious 
texture which his creative thoughts have woven for them- 
selves. But for this very reason, we come back again and 
again to these divinely chosen similitudes with fresh interest, 
with new delight, being continually rewarded with glimpses, 
unperceived before, of the strange and manifold relations, 
in which the visible and the invisible stand to>x)ne another. 

Thus, brethren, have I endeavoured to present to you this 
day a few of the aspects under which this Word of the Scrip- 
ture may be contemplated as one fitted evermore to provoke, 
and evermore to reward, our inquiries. As one said of old, 
Habet Scrvptura Sacra haustus jprimos, habet secundos, habet 
tertios. There is, indeed, a tone and temper of spirit, in 
which if we allow ourselves, all its wells will seem dry, and 
all its fields barren. The superficial dealer with this Word, 
he who reads, formally fulfilling an unwelcome task, he who 
feels in no living relation with the things which he reads, 
who consults the oracle, but expects no living answer from 
its lips, who has never known himself a pilgrim of eternity, 
to whom life has never, like that fabled Sphinx, presented 
riddles which either he must solve, or, not solving, must 
perish, — such a one may say, as in his heart he will say, 
What is this Word more than another ? It may bring to 
him no other feelings but those of tedious monotony and 
inexpressible weariness. But with the loving and earnest 
seeker it will prove far otherwise : he will ever be making 
new discoveries in these spiritual heavens ; ever to him will 
what seemed at first but a light vaporous cloud, upon closer 



100 LECTURE VI. 

gaze, to his armed eye, resolve itself into a world of stars. 
The faxther he advances, the more will he be aware that 
what lies before him is far more than what lies behind — the 
readier will he be to take up his hymn of praise and thanks- 
giving, and to wonder with the Apostle at "the depths 
of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God" 
which are displayed at once in his works and in his 
Word. 



LECTURE VII. 

THE FRUITEULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 

EZEKIEL XL VII. 9. 

And it shall come, to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, 
whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live. 

The aspect of my subject, which I desire this day to 
bring under your notice is this, namely, the fruitfulness of 
Holy Scripture ; in other words the manner in which it has 
shown itself a germ of life in all the noblest regions of 
man's activity ; has with its productive energy impregnated 
the world; and how, to use the image suggested by my 
text, every thing has lived where these healing waters 
have come ; so that in this way, too, this Word has attested 
itself that which in my preceding lectures I have endea- 
voured to prove that it was fitted for being, that which we 
might beforehand presume it would be, namely, the unfolder 
of all the nobler and higher life of the world. And these 
are considerations which will suit as well at a period of these 
discourses, when they are drawing nigh to their conclusion. 
For it were to little profit to have shown how the Scripture 
ought to have been all this, how it was fitted for being all 
this, unless it could be shown also that it had been ; unless 
we could point to the world's history in evidence that it 
had done that, which we say it was adapted for doing. 
"The blind see, the lepers are cleansed, the dead are 
raised;" — it was to these mighty works that Christ appealed 
in answer to the question, " Art thou He that should come, 
or look we for another ?" And this is the true answer to 
every misgiving question of a like kind. The real evidence 
for aught which comes claiming to be from God, is its 

9* (101) 



102 LECTURE VII. 

power — the power which it is able to put forth for blessing 
and for healing. If the Scriptures manifested no such 
power, all other evidence for their divine origin, howevor 
convincing we might think it ought to be, yet practically it 
would fail to convince. Men will not live on the report 
that aught is great or true, unless they so see it and so find 
it themselves. But if they do, no assertion on the part of 
others that it is small, will prevail to make them count 
light of it. For a moment the confident assertions of gain- 
sayers may perplex, or even seriously injure, their faith : 
but presently it will resume its hold and its empire again. 

Thus it has been well and memorably said, that the great 
and standing evidence for Christianity is Christendom \ and 
it was with good reason, and out of a true feeling of this, 
that Origen and other early apologists of the Faith, albeit 
they had not such a full-formed Christendom as we have to 
appeal to, did yet, when the adversaries boasted of their 
Apollonius and other such shadowy personages, and sought to 
set them up as rivals and competitors of the Lord of glory, 
make answer by demanding, " "What became of these men ? 
what significance had they for the world's after develop- 
ment ? what have they bequeathed to show that they and 
their appearance lay deep in the mind and counsel of G-od ? 
what society did they found ? where is there a fellowship of 
living men gathered in their name ? or where any mighty 
footmarks left upon the earth to witness that greater than 
mortals have trodden it Y' And the same answer is good, 
when it is transferred to the books which at any time have 
made ungrounded claim to be divine records, and as such, 
to stand upon a level with the Canonical Scriptures ; and 
which sometimes even in our day are brought forward in 
the hope of confounding the Canonical in a common dis- 
credit with them. We in the same way make answer, Is 
there not a difference ? besides all other condemnation 
under which they lie, besides the absence of historic attest- 



THE TRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 103 

ation, and the want of inward religious meaning and aim, 
are they not self-condemned, in their utter insignificance — 
in their barrenness — in the entire oblivion into which they 
have fallen — in. the fact, in short, that nothing has come of 
them ? What men have they moulded ? what stamp or 
impress have they left of themselves upon the world ? 
Where is there a society, or even a man, that appeals to 
them or lives by them ? 

Thus, let any one acquainted with the apocryphal gospels, 
compare them for an instant with the sacred Four which we 
recognise and receive. It is not merely that there is an 
inward difference between these and those, which would be 
characterized not too strongly as a difference like that which 
finds place between stately forest-trees and the low tangled 
brushwood which springs up under their shadow ; it is not 
merely that those spurious gospels are evermore revolting 
to the religious sense, abandoning earth without soaring to 
heaven j robbing the person of Christ of its human features, 
without lending to it any truly divine; ever mistaking size 
for greatness, and the monstrous for the miraculous. It is 
not this only, but the contrast is at least as remarkable in 
this respect, that while the Canonical Gospels have been so 
fruitful, from those other nothing has sprung : while the 
Canonical have been as germs unfolding themselves end- 
lessly; winged seeds endued with a vital energy, which, 
where they have lighted, have taken root downward and 
sprung upward; those other might be likened to the chaff 
borne about by the winds of chance, having no reproductive 
powers; owing their origin to obscure heretical sects, never 
extricating themselves from those narrow circles in which 
they first were born; and, save only as literary curiosities, 
with the perishing of those sects themselves perishing for 
ever. They have remained as dry sticks, as the barren rods 
which refused to blossom, — and as such not to abide in the 
sanctuary. (Numb, xvii.) -But the Canonical Gospels have 



104 LECTURE VII. 

witnessed for themselves, as did Aaron's rod, when it 
budded and clothed itself with leaves and blossoms and 
almonds. They too, blossomiDg and budding, have borne 
witness to themselves, and to their right to be laid up in 
the very Ark of the Testimony for ever. For it is not the 
authority and decision of the Church which has made the 
Canonical Gospels potent, and the apocryphal impotent, 
those fruitful and these sterile ; rather that decision is the 
formal acknowledgment of a fact, which was a fact before ; 
a submission to authority, to the authority of the Spirit 
witnessing to and discerning that Word which is the Lord's ; 
this, rather than any exercising of authority. That decision 
was the spiritual instinct of the Church recognizing and 
setting her seal to a fact which was a fact before — namely, 
that these were false and those true ; she distinguished thus 
the chaff from the corn, but it was not her decision which 
had any thing to do with making these to be chaff and 
those wheat. 

It is the task which I propose to myself to-day, to con- 
sider a few aspects under which the Scriptures have thus 
shown themselves strong; have approved themselves quick- 
eners of the spiritual and intellectual life of men ; although 
here, in treating such a subject as this, one is tempted, as 
more than once has been my lot, to start back at the great- 
ness of the theme, the vastness of knowledge of all kinds 
which to handle it worthily would require the fragmentary 
nature of aught which, even were the knowledge possessed? 
one could hope within the limits of a single discourse to 
present. As the matter, however, may not be passed by, I 
will seek to present to you one or two reflections, in the hope 
that they may be only as the first thoughts of a more fruit- 
ful series which your own minds will suggest. 

And, perhaps one of the first which suggests itself, is 
this, namely, how productive the Holy Scriptures have 
been, even in regions of inward life and activity, where, at 



THE FRUITFULNESS OP SCRIPTURE. 105 

first sight, one would least have expected it, where we 
should have been tempted, for many reasons, to anticipate 
exactly opposite effects. How many things Christianity 
might, at first sight, have threatened to leave out, to take 
no note of, or indeed utterly to suppress, which, so far from 
really warring against, it has raised to higher perfection 
than ever in the old world they had attained. With what 
despair, for example, a lover of art, one who at Athens or 
at Rome fondly had dwelt among the beautiful creations of 
poet and of painter, would have contemplated the rise of 
the new religion, and the authority which its doctrines were 
acquiring over the hearts and spirits of men. What a 
death-knell must he have heard in this to all in which his 
soul so greatly delighted. He might have been ready, 
perhaps, to acknowledge that our human life under this 
new teaching, would be more rigorously earnest, more 
severe, more pure : but all its grace and its beauty, all 
which it borrowed of these from the outer world, he would 
have concluded, had been laid under a ban, and must now 
vanish for ever. This was evidently, in great part, the 
cause of the unhappy Julian's mislike of the rising faith — 
of his alienation from it, as of that of many other heathens, 
like-minded with him. It is true, their hostility lay much 
deeper than this, that it grew out of a far bitterer root. 
But this was evidently one of their griefs against the doc- 
trine of the Nazarene. They could not consent to lose the 
grace and beauty of the Hellenistic worship : all art seemed 
inextricably linked and bound up with the forms of the 
old religion, and, if that perished, inevitably doomed to 
perish with it : and so they resisted while they could ; and 
when they could resist no longer, they sat down and made 
passionate lamentation at the grave of the old world, which 
all their lamentations could not call back to life ; instead 
of rejoicing at the birth and by the cradle of the new, with 
which indeed all the hopes of the future were bound up. 



106 LECTURE VII. 

And the Christian himself of those earliest ages might 
almost have consented to take the same views — even as we 
do find a Tertullian, and others of his temper, actually 
doing : nor in this was he at all to be wondered at, least of 
all did he deserve the sneers with which the infidel historian 
of the later empire has, on this account, visited him. His 
exaggerations were only those into which a man of strong 
moral earnestness might most naturally have fallen. So had 
all skill and device of poet and of painter engaged then in 
the service of the flesh, so did they do exclusive homage to 
the old idolatries, so deeply polluted, for the most part, were 
they, so far sunken with a sunken moral world, that the 
Christian neophyte, when he renounced, in his baptismal vow, 
all pomps of the devil, might easily have deemed that these 
were certainly included ; and that to forego them wholly and 
for ever, was his one duty, his only safety. 

How little, at any rate, could one or the other, could friend 
or foe of the nascent faith, have forecast that out of it, — that, 
nourished by the Christian books, by the great thoughts 
which Christ set stirring in humanity, and of which these 
books kept a lasting record, there should unfold itself a 
poetry infinitely greater, an art infinitely higher, than any 
which the old world had seen; — that this faith, which looked 
so rigid, so austere, even so forbidding, should clothe itself in 
forms of grace and loveliness, such as men had never dreamt 
of before f that poetry should not be henceforward the play 
of the spirit, but its holiest earnest; and those skilless 
Christian hymns, those hymns " to Christ as to God," of 
which Pliny speaks, so rude probably in regard of form, 
should yet be the preludes of strains higher than the world 
had listened to yet. Or, who would have supposed that those 
artless paintings of the catacombs had the prophecy in them 
of more wondrous compositions than men's eyes had ever seen 
— or that a day should arrive when, above many a dark vault 
and narrow crypt, where now the Christian worshippers 



THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 107 

gathered in secret, should arise domes and cathedrals, 
embodying loftier ideas, because ideas relating to the eternal 
and the infinite, than all those Grecian temples, which now 
stood so fair and so strong, but which yet aimed not to lift 
men's minds from the earth which they adorned. 

How little would the one or other, would Christian or 
heathen have presaged such a future as this — that art was 
not to perish, but only to be purified and redeemed from the 
service of the flesh, and from whatever was clinging to and 
hindering it from realizing its true glory, — and that this 
book, which does not talk about such matters, which does not 
make beauty, but holiness, its end and aim — should yet be 
the truest nourisher of all out of which any genuine art ever 
has proceeded ; the truest fosterer of beauty, in that it is the 
nourisher of the affections, the sustainer of the relations 
between God and men; which affections and which relations 
are indeed the only root out of which any poetry or art 
worthy of the name, ever have sprung. For these affections 
being laid waste, those relations being broken, art is first 
stricken with barrenness, and then, in a little while, withers 
and pines and dies — as that ancient art, which had been so 
fertile while faith survived, was, when the church was born, 
already withering and dying under the influence of the skep- 
ticism, the profligacy, the decay of family and national life, 
the extinction of religious faith, which so eminently marked 
the time : only having a name to live, resting merely on the 
traditions of an earlier age, and on the eve of utter dissolu- 
tion. Such was its condition when Christ came, and cast 
in his Word, as that which should make all things new, into 
the midst of an old and decrepit and worn-out world. 

Yet here it may be as well to observe that when I use this 
language, it is not as assuming that the Bible, merely as a 
book apart had done, or could have done, this, or aught else 
whereof presently there may be occasion to speak — not as 
though the book had been cast into the world and had leavened 



108 LECTURE VII. 

it, itself the sole and all-sufficient gift which Christ had 
bequeathed unto men. Rather, the Spirit, the Word, and 
the church are the three mighty factors which have wrought 
together for the great and glorious issue of a Christendom 
such as that in the midst of which we now stand. The 
church, taught and enlightened by the Spirit, unfolds and 
lays out the Word, and only as it is informed and quickened 
by that blessed Spirit of God, can lay it out for the healing 
of the nations. We cannot think of this book by itself 
doing the work, any more than we can think of the church 
doing it without this book, or of the two doing it together 
without the ever-present breath of an Almighty Spirit. 

But while this work is thus the result of a three-fold 
energy; while we can never, so long as we think correctly, 
separate one of its factors, save for distinction's sake, from 
the others; while therefore speaking of the Scripture and 
what it has wrought, we must ever conceive of it as in the 
possession of a living body of interpreters, the company of 
the faithful, and of them as enlightened by the Holy Spirit 
to use it aright ; yet not the less may I ask you to contem- 
plate the mighty work of the world's regeneration in those 
features upon which the influences of a Scripture are mainly 
traceable, to note the part which this scripture has borne in 
bringing about that new creation, wherein the old things of 
the world have passed away, and all things have become 
new. 

For, without running into the tempting error of painting 
the old world black, for the purpose of bringing out, as by 
a dark back-ground, the brightness and glory of the new ; 
without denying to that old world what it had of noble and 
true, or calling, as some have done, its virtues merely showy 
and splendid sins ; yet it is not easy to estimate how much was 
to be done, how much to be undone, ere a Christendom, even 
such as we behold it now, could emerge out of that world 
which alone yielded the materials out of which the new 



THE FRUITFULNESS OP SCRIPTURE 7 . 109 

creation should be composed. The word of the Cross had 
need, as a mighty leaven, to penetrate through every inter- 
stice of society, leavening language, and laws, and literature, 
and institutions, and manners. For it was not merely that 
at that change the world changed its religion, but in that 
change was implied the transformation, little by little, of 
every thing besides; every thing else had need to reconstruct 
itself afresh. And in this Word there resided a power equal 
to this need. The pattern of Christ, kept in the record of 
Scripture, ever clear in all its distinctness of outline before 
men's eyes, his work thus ever repeating itself for them over 
again, has given, as we ourselves see and feel, a new, inas- 
much as it is infinitely higher, standard of ideal goodness 
to the world — has cast down usurping pretenders to the 
name of virtues from their seats, has lifted up despised 
graces in their room. That Word has every where given to 
us graces for virtues, and martyrs for heroes; it has so 
reversed men's estimate of greatness, that a wreath of thorns 
is felt to be a far worthier ornament for a brow than a 
diadem of jewels — a Christ upon his cross to be a spectacle 
more glorious far than a Csesar on his throne. 

From that Word, too, we have derived such a sense of 
the duties of relation, of the debt of love which every man 
owes to every other, as was altogether strange to the heathen 
world. For when, in that well known story, the poet awoke 
shouts of a tumultuous applause by declaring nothing 
human alien from himself who was a man, deep as was the 
feeling in men's hearts which was here appealed to, yet in 
those very shouts of applause, it was declared to be as new 
as it was deep. In those was the joyful recognition of a 
truth which lay deep in every man's bosom, but which had 
not taken form or shape or found utterance until then. Yet, 
with all our practical shortcomings in love to our brethren, 
how different is the condition marked by this little incident 
from ours, in which this noble utterance of the Roman poet 

10 



110 LECTURE VII. 

is felt to be so true as hardly to escape from being a truism ; 
and the love which men owe to one another on the score of 
their common stock, is so taken for granted, and the idea of 
it has so penetrated even into our common speech, that kind 
and kinned, human and humane, are, with us, but different 
pronunciations of the same words. 

And, at least as wonderful, at least as fruitful, is the 
incoming of the Word of Christ, not into the midst of an 
old and corrupt civilization, but when it kindles for the first 
time a savage people into life. How does it seem to brood 
with a creative warmth and energy over all the rudiments 
of a higher life, which lays in that people's bosom, and yet 
but for this never could have come to the birth, rather were 
in danger of utterly dying out. How does it arrest at once 
that centrifugal progress of sin, which is ever drawing the 
men or the nations that have wandered out of the sphere of 
the divine attraction, farther and farther from God, the true 
centre of their being. Tribes which were in danger of 
letting go the last remnant of their spiritual heritage, nay, 
of utterly and literally perishing from the face of the earth, 
victims of their own vices, and of that uttermost degradation 
which had caused them at length to let go even those lowest 
arts by which animal existence is sustained, even these, that 
Word finds, even in these nurses up the dying embers of 
life; till the savage re-awakens to the consciousness of a 
man, and the horde begins, however feebly at first, to knit 
itself into the promise of a nation. 

There may be spectacles which attract us more, there may 
be tidings to which we listen with a keener interest, but 
surely there can be no tidings worthier to be listened to, no 
spectacle upon which angels look down with a livelier sym- 
pathy, than those which such a land and time will often 
present; when, it may be, some grey -beard chief, stained in 
times past with a thousand crimes, but now having washed 
away them all in the waters of baptism, hangs upon the words 



THE FRUITFULNESS OP SCRIPTURE. Ill 

of life, makes himself, perhaps, the humble willing scholar 
of some little child, that he may learn to read with his own 
eyes of that Saviour who has pardoned even him. And ever, 
as he reads of " the gentleness of Christ/' of his prayers for 
his crucifiers, of Him who, being first, made himself the 
last, who, being Lord of all, became servant of all, there 
dawns upon him more and more the glory of meekness, of 
over coming evil with good, of serving others in love, 
instead of being himself served in fear : and he understands 
that this only is truly to live, and all which he has lived 
contrary to this, has been not life, but a hideous denial of 
life. Such sights other days have seen ; such are to be seen 
in our own : for, blessed be Grod, it is not our fathers only 
who have told us of such things done in their times of old, 
but our own report the same. We too, " see our tokens." 
In New Zealand, in the far islands of the Pacific, we have 
proof that this Word is yet mighty, through Grod, for cast- 
ing down the strong holds of Satan and of sin. 

Nor needs it to look thus far abroad to be reminded of 
what this Word has done. The Scripture itself is full of 
remembrances of its own power. He who, tolerably ac- 
quainted with the past history of the Church, with the 
struggles which accompanied the unfolding, fixing, and 
vindicating of her dogma, — he who, furnished with this 
knowledge, passes over Scripture, may in some moods of 
his mind pass over it as over a succession of battle fields. 
He may be likened to a traveller journeying through some 
land, which, by the importance of its position, or the great- 
ness of its attractions, has drawn contending hosts to its 
soil, and been a battle ground for innumerable generations. 
Besides in all those pages which speak more directly to 
himself, they are eloquent to him with a thousand stirring 
recollections. For at every step which he advances, he 
recognises that which has been the motive of some mighty 
and long-drawn conflict, in which the keenest and brightest 



112 LECTURE Vn. 

intellects, the kingliest spirits, the Bernards and the Abelards 
of their day, were engaged. Here, there, and every where, 
be it that he wanders among the extinguished volcanoes of 
controversies which have now burned themselves out, or among 
those which are naming still, he meets with that, to main- 
tain their conviction about which, men have been content to 
spend their lives, to make shipwreck of their worldly hopes, 
have dwelt in deserts, in caves, and in dungeons, yea, gladly 
have encountered all from which nature most, and most natu- 
rally shrinks. And whatever there may have been of earthly 
and of carnal mingling in the motives of the combatants, 
however in some of them he can recognise only the cham- 
pions of error, yet in these mighty and passionate strivings, 
in these conflicts which generation has bequeathed to gene- 
ration, he reads the confession which all past ages have 
borne, that this Word was worth contending for, — being 
felt by those worthiest to judge, dearer than life itself, and 
such that things else were cheap by comparison with it. 

Strange, too, that even where there have not been these 
stirring excitements, where there has been no trumpet-peal 
sounding in men's ears, and summoning them to do battle 
for some perilled truth, that even here, too, multitudes of 
men should have been well pleased to employ their lives 
in learning themselves better to understand, in seeking to 
make others understand better, this one Book — should have 
counted those lives worthily spent, and all other wisdom 
and knowledge then only to have found their true meaning 
and destination, when doing service as of handmaids unto 
it. For vast as is the apparatus of helps of all kinds which 
have accumulated round such other books as are signal 
monuments of human intellect and power ; many as we find 
well satisfied to be nothing as independent laborers in the 
fields of knowledge, content to be only ministrant to the 
better understanding of this author or that book ; yet are 
these taken altogether few and insignificant beside those 



THE FRUITFULNESS OF SCRIPTURE. 113 

that have thus felt in regard of the one Book with which 
we have to do. Surely the spectacle of any great library, 
and of the volumes there which stand in immediate relation 
to this one, with the certainty, that so long as the world 
stands, they will go on accumulating and multiplying, must 
to a thoughtful mind suggest many meditations of what 
the meaning and significance of that one must be, and the 
manner in which it must set in motion the minds of men. 
Nor will he, in estimating this, fail to call to mind that, 
those which stand in direct relation to that Volume, which 
bear upon the front that they are thus connected with it, 
multitudinous past all count as they seem, are yet but a 
small fraction of those which owe to this one all which is 
most characteristic in them — their impulse, their motive, 
their form, their spirit ; that all modern European literature 
is there as in its germ ; that even the works which seem to 
stand remotest from it, least to own a fealty to it, do yet 
pay to it the unconscious, it may be the unwilling homage 
of being wholly different from what they would have been, 
— had they indeed at all existed, — without it. 

Such, brethren, are a few aspects under which I would 
ask you to consider how the Holy Scriptures have justified 
themselves by the effects which they have brought about, 
by the mighty deeds which they have done j showing them- 
selves seeds of life, leaven of power in the world. And I 
should be untrue to my position here, did I conclude with- 
out asking you to make personal application of the things 
which you have heard to yourselves. This Word which has 
thus been fruitful every where, which has supplied what was 
lacking and healed what was sick, and revived what was 
ready to die, will it be less effectual in us, if only we receive 
it aright ? This, which has made so much else, like the dry 
rod of Aaron, to blossom and to bud, will it not be as potent 
in our hearts, till they too are clothed with foliage and fruits 

10* 



114 LECTURE VII 

and flowers which are not naturally their own ? Shall we 
say, "lama dry tree," when we might be as trees planted 
by rivers of water, which should not fear the drought of the 
desert, nor see when the heat cometh ? All things have 
lived whithersoever these waters which issue from the sanc- 
tuary have come. Shall not our hearts live also, until we 
too have like reason with the Psalmist for prizing these tes- 
timonies of God, even because with them He has quickened 
-us? 



LECTURE VIII. 

THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 

Revelation VI. 2. 

Conquering and to Conquer. 

An earlier lecture in this present course was dedicated to 
the manner in which Holy Scripture had, little by little, laid 
bare its treasures to the Church ; and in my very latest I 
had occasion to speak of the victories which the Truth had won 
and was winning still — the way in which the word of the 
Scripture was vindicating itself to be all that it claimed to be, 
showing itself mighty, through God, for doing its appointed 
work ; how, like the personal Word, it had ridden forth and was 
riding yet, a victorious conqueror over the earth. It remains 
to consider, and with this consideration we shall fitly con- 
clude our subject, in what way it is likely to approve itself 
a conqueror to the end ; what preparations we can trace in 
it for meeting the future evils of the world, the future needs 
of the Church; how far we may suppose that this Book, 
which has revealed so much, may yet have much more to 
reveal. 

And this is our confidence, that as the Scripture has suf- 
ficed for the past, so also it will suffice for the time to come ; 
that it has resources adequate to meet all demands which 
may be made on it; that it has in reserve whatsoever any 
new conditions of the world, — any new shapes of evil, any 
new, if they be righteous, cravings of the spirits of men, — ■ 
may require. We believe that as the Scripture is an armory 
in which the Church has found weapons for all past conflicts, 
so will it find them there for all which are yet to come — 

(115) 



118 LECTURE VIII. 

conflicts, which, it may he, we as little forecast or dream of 
now, as we do of the weapons which are ready wrought in 
this armory for bringing them to a glorious termination; 
and the weapons, too, themselves being oftentimes such, that 
they who were by God employed to forge them, while they 
knew that they would serve present needs, yet hardly 
knew, perhaps knew not at all, what remote purposes they 
should also serve, to what great ulterior purposes they should 
one day be turned. Yet thus, no doubt, it shall be : for 
just as in works of man's mind, talent knows all which it 
means, but genius, which is nearer akin to inspiration, 
means much more than it consciously knows; even so wise 
men and prophets and evangelists, who were used for the 
uttering of this Word, knowiDg much of that which they 
spake and recorded, yet meant still more than they knew — 
the Holy Ghost guiding and shaping their utterances, and 
causing them oftentimes to declare deeper things, and things 
of wider reach and of more manifold utility, than even they 
themselves, enlarged and enlightened by that Spirit as they 
were, were conscious of the while. That which they spake 
being central Truth, presented a front, not merely to the 
lies of their day, not merely to the falsehood which they dis- 
tinctly had in their minds to encounter, but presents a front 
to every later lie as well ; and so we have entire confidence 
that the Truth being ever, in the language of Bacon, "a hill 
not to be commanded," the same those Scriptures, which 
are Scriptures of very truth, shall show themselves — a hill 
which shall never be commanded, bnt which rather shall 
itself command all other heights and eminences of the spiri- 
tual and intellectual world. However high these tower, this 
Word will always have heights which tower above them all; 
judging all things, it will be judged of none; itself the 
measure of all, no other thing will bring a measure unto it. 

We can indeed guess but uncertainly what may be the 
future unrolling of the world's history — what anti-christian 



THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 117 

forms of society may rise up for the moment seeming to 
keep their promise, consecrating the flesh, breaking down 
the walls of separation between the holy and profane, mak- 
ing all profane while they pretend to make all holy — what 
master-works of Satan, his latest and crowning forms of 
opposition to the Truth. Or, again, we can only uncertainly 
apprehend what heresies may appear, subtler and more 
attractive even than any which the world has yet beheld — 
coming with greater semblance of holiness, and well-nigh 
causing even the elect to fail. But our reliance in this 
"Word and the revelation of the Name of God which is there, 
is this, that out of it the Church will be able to refute those 
heresies — by the help of its warnings and intimations to 
detect and to defy the attractions of Antichrist, even when 
he comes with all the lying wonders, and in all the false 
glory of his kingdom. 

For while it is hard for us to say what may be the exact 
forms of those future evils, while we cannot discern accu- 
rately beforehand the lineaments and proportions of these 
latest monstrous shapes which shall ascend from the pit, — 
as neither would this foreknowledge profit us much ; — yet 
the hints which in God's prophetic word we have, the course 
of the mystery of iniquity as it is already working, seem 
alike to point to this, that as there has been an aping of the 
monarchy of the Father, in the absolute despotisms of the 
world, an aping of the economy of the Son, as though he 
already sat visibly on his throne, in its spiritual despotisms, 
and eminently in that of Rome; so there remains yet for the 
world, as the crowning delusion, a lying imitation of the 
kingdom and dispensation of the Spirit — such as in the law- 
less Communist sects of the middle ages, in the Familists of 
a later day, in the St. Simonians of our own, has attempted 
to come to the birth, though in each case the world was not 
ripe for it yet, and the thing was withdrawn for a time. 
Yet doubtless only for a time j to reappear in an after hour 



118 LECTURE VIII. 

— full of false freedom, full of the promise of bringing all 
things into one ; making war on the family, as something 
which separates between man and man, breaking down and 
obliterating all distinctions, the distinctions between nation 
and nation, between the man and the woman, between the 
flesh and the spirit, between the Church and the world. So 
seems it ; and when we translate St. Paul's words, with 
which he characterizes the final Antichrist, as though he had 
simply called him " that wicked one,"* we lose a confirma- 
tion of this view which his words more accurately rendered 
would have given us. He is not simply the wicked one, but 
oavo/xoi the lawless one; and the mystery is not merely a 
mystery of iniquity but of lawlessness (avo/ua*.) Law, in 
all its manifestations, is that which he shall rage against, 
making hideous misapplications of that great truth, that 
where the Spirit is, there is liberty. 

Then, when this shall have come to pass, then a,t length 
the great anti-trinity of hell, the dragon, the beast, and the 
false prophet, will have been fully revealed in all deceivable- 
ness of unrighteousness ; — and yet not so mighty to deceive, 
but that the Church of the redeemed, armed and forewarned 
by this "Word of God, shall see in all this, only what it 
looked to see, only what it had been taught to expect; and 
in the might of the counter truth, in the confession of the 
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, shall be saved even 
in its weakest and simplest member, from that strong delu- 
sion which shall be too much for every one besides. 

And in thus speaking of Holy Scripture, I am but express- 
ing a confidence which those who have searched the deepest 
into it have oftentimes expressed. Thus to take but one 
name and another out of the noble catalogue of English 
worthies, Robert Boyle expresses himself thus : "I consider 
here that as the Bible was not written for any one particular 

* 2 Thess. ii. 8. 



THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 119 

time or people, but for the whole church militant diffused 
through all nations and ages, so that there are many passages 
very useful, which will not be found so these many ages ; 
being possibly reserved by the prophetic Spirit that indited 
them, (and whose omniscience comprises and unites in one 
prospect all times and all events,) to quell some future fore- 
seen heresy, which will not, perhaps, be born till we be dead, 
or resolve some yet unformed doubts, or confound some error 
that hath not yet a name." And Bishop Butler uses lan- 
guage well nigh the same : " Nor is it," he says, " at all 
incredible that a Book which has been so long in the posses- 
sion of mankind should yet contain many truths as yet 
undiscovered. For all the same phenomena and the same 
faculties of investigation from which such great discoveries in 
natural knowledge have been made in the present and last age, 
were equally in the possession of mankind several thousand 
years before. And possibly it might be intended that events 
as they came to pass should open and ascertain the meaning 
of several parts of Scripture." 

But, besides these mighty mischiefs which may hereafter 
arise, of which we can at most discern now only the dim 
beginnings, the obscure foreshadowings, there are also others 
which have already taken form and shape — some of them 
such as have stood strong and in the main unshaken for 
thousands of years ) which yet we believe, which indeed yet 
we know, shall one day be overthrown by the greater power 
and prevalence of the Truth. For we are sure that the 
religion of Christ is as the rod of Moses, which did in the 
end swallow up every rod of the magicians — that the Church 
shall possess the earth — that "the field" in which the Son of 
Man sows his seed is not this land or that land, but " the 
world." And anticipating, or to speak more truly, being 
sure of this, it may not be unbecoming to see if we can at 
all discern in Scripture the preparations which have been 
there made, and the might which is there slumbering, against 






120 LECTURE VIII. 

each of those closer conflicts, which the Church, by its help, 
must one day wage with those forms of untruth and error. 
Such inquiry will, at any rate, not be foreign to our subject; 
for that subject being the fitness of Holy Scripture for 
unfolding the spiritual life of men, a great part of that fit- 
ness must lie in its capacity to meet and overcome each 
deadlier form of superstition and error, which, under one 
name or another, cramps and confines, or wholly hinders, the 
true development of the spirits of men. 

How profitable were it, in regard of the more effectual 
conducting of Christian missions, to be more conscious than 
generally we seek to be, of what is our peculiar strength, 
and what the peculiar weakness of each of those systems of 
error, which we seek, in love to the souls which were made 
prisoners by it, to overthrow ; — so that we should not blindly 
run a tilt against it, with no other preparation save a con- 
fidence in the goodness of our cause, but wisdom and insight 
assail it there, where there were best hope of assailing with 
success. For every one of these, while their strength is in 
that fragment of Truth, which, however maimed and marred, 
with whatever contradictions and under whatever disguises, 
they hold, have also eminently their weak side, that on which 
they signally deny some great Truth which the spirit of man 
craves, which the Scriptures of God affirm — a side, therefore, 
on which, if assailed, they must sooner or later perish, or 
rather will not always continue at strife with their own 
blessedness. To know this, and to know, also, what engines 
out of the divine armory ought to be especially advanced 
against each of these strong-holds of confusion, to know not 
merely that we are strong and they weak, but where and 
why strong in regard of each, and where and why they are 
weak ; this is surely a needful, as it is a much neglected, 
discipline; this is a duty not indolently to be foregone by a 
Church like our own, a Church which God's providence and 



THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 121 

leading has so clearly marked out to do the work of an Evan- 
gelist on vast continents and in far islands of the sea. 

To give such a training as this, was no doubt the meaning 
and purpose of the catechetical schools of Alexandria, so 
famous through all Christian antiquity ; they were instituted 
to afford the highest culture to the evangelist, to give him 
the fullest understanding of what he was to oppose, and how 
he was to do it. And such an insight as this, could we 
have it clear, into Scripture and its adaptation for overcoming 
each shape of falsehood, how would it make us workmen 
that did not need to be ashamed. How would it enable us 
at once, and without beating the air, to address ourselves to 
the points really at issue between us on one side, and Jews, 
Mohammedans, and infidels, on the other. For the Truth 
which is still the same, which might not give up one jot or 
tittle of itself, though it had with this the certainty of win- 
ning a world, may yet of infinite love continually change its 
voice, and present itself ever differently, according to the 
different necessities of those whom it would fain make its 
own. 

And on the other hand, we address ourselves but in a 
slight and inefficient manner to our work, when, without dis- 
crimination, without acquaintance with those systems which 
hold souls in bondage, which hinder them from coming to 
the light of life, we have but one method with them all — 
one language in which to describe them all — one common 
charge of belonging to the devil on which to arraign them ; 
instead of recognising, as we ought, that each province of 
the dark kingdom of error is different from every other ; 
instead of seeing that it is not a lie which can ever make 
any thing strong — that it is not certainly their lie which has 
ever made them strong, and enabled them to stand their 
ground so long, and some of them, saddest of all ! to win 
ground for awhile from Christendom itself; but the truth 
which that lie perverts and denies. Handling them in that 

11 



122 LECTURE VIII. 

other way, we turn but to little advantage that manifold 
Word of wisdom with which God has enriched his Church, 
and which containing as it does its own special antidote for 
every error, would allow, and indeed demands, a much more 
special dealing with each, and one which would get much 
more nearly to the heart of the matter. 

Thus the Mohammedan is strong in that he affirms God 
to be distinct from the creature, so that he may not without 
blasphemy be confused with it — a jealous God, who will not 
give his glory to another. In the might of this faith, in the 
conviction that God had raised him up to assert this truth in 
the face of all who were forgetting it, he overran half a 
world. But he is weak, and the moon of Islam, as it has 
waxed, so will it wane before the Sun of Righteousness, in- 
asmuch as he makes the gulf which divides God and man to 
be a gulf which can never be bridged over, an impassable 
chasm, fixed for eternity ; he is weak, because he knows not, 
and will not know, of one, the Son of Mary, the Son of God, 
in whom the human and divine were not confounded, nor lost 
one in the other, but united. He does not satisfy the long- 
ings of the human race, which was made for this union as 
its highest end and crowning perfection, which will be satis- 
fied with nothing short of this; and therefore we are sure 
that the day will come, however little we may as yet discern 
its signs, when the fiery sword of Mohammed will grow pale 
before the ever brightening lustre of the cross of the Son 
of Man ; when the Scriptures will show themselves over all 
the dark places of the earth mightier than the Koran. We 
are sure of this, because those Scriptures maintain all which 
is there of truth — are as jealous and more jealous of the 
incommunicable name of God, — say, and say far more 
clearly, Our God is one God; but in addition to this, 
amrm that which is there denied, but which the spirit of 
man will never rest until it has found and known, a Son of 
God, and him also the Son of Man. 



THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 123 

The Indian religions, — they, too, are not without their 
elements of an obscured truth — and in this mainly, that they 
declare it to be most worthy of God to reveal Himself as man 
— that this is the only true revelation of Him, that an incar- 
nation is the fittest outcoming of the glory of God. But, not 
to urge that what they have to tell of such matters are only 
dreams of men, and not facts of God — besides this, they are 
comparatively worthless, in that they do not concentrate and 
gather up this revelation of God in one incarnation, but lose 
and scatter it through unnumbered. For while one incar- 
nation is precious, a thousand are worth nothing; they 
become mere transient points of contact between God and 
man, momentary docetic apparitions of the divine under 
human forms. And the books which are the records of 
these, and the religion which rests on those books, must 
give way before that Book, which can say in holiest, yet sober- 
est earnest, " The Word was made flesh " — and which knows 
not merely of an incarnation, but of a Resurrection and 
an Ascension, in which the Son of God made manifest that 
he had wedded the humanity for ever, that he had not come 
merely into transient relation with it, but had made it his 
own for eternity ; sitting down in it on the right hand of 
the Majesty on high. 

And that other later birth of Hindooism, that other vast 
system of further Asia, which we are continually perplexed 
whether to call it a pantheism, or a gigantic atheism, that 
which in the end loses every thing in God, and makes ab- 
sorption in Him the ultimate end of being, that, too, begins 
with fairer promises. For it starts with that which is so 
deeply true, that in God we live and move and have our 
being — that as man came from God, so he must return to 
God — that there is but one Spirit which moves through all 
things. But then, refusing to know aught but the Spirit, re- 
fusing to know the Father and the Son from whom that Spirit 
proceeds, so neither can it save its votaries from that gulf 



124 LECTURE VIII. 

wherein all things, and man the first, are annihilated in an 
abysmal deep, which is not the less dreadful, because it calls 
itself God ; that gulf which is ever yawning for every nobler 
and deeper speculator in theology, who has not the mystery 
of the ever-blessed Trinity, three Persons and one God, for 
his safeguard and his stay, — an ever-abiding witness to him 
for the distinctness of personal being. And we are sure that 
neither will this system stand before that Word which affirms, 
and only with far higher clearness, that " God is a Spirit/' 
but affirms also, that "there are three that bear record in 
heaven, the Father, the "Word, and the Holy Ghost/' with- 
out which that other truth is only as a noble river presently 
to lose itself among the sands. 

These, brethren, are the great rival religions to Christianity, 
which yet contend with it for the possession of the world — 
each of them, as you see, presenting points of contact for 
the absolute Truth ; and at the same time all presenting 
points of weakness — sides upon which they dumbly crave to 
be fulfilled by this Truth, even while they are striving the 
most fiercely against it; the Truth in Holy Scripture being 
at once the antagonist and the complement of, them all. 

Nor may I not observe that any other dealing with them 
than this, which, even while it wars against them, welcomes 
and honours the wreck and fragment of Truth which they 
may still retain — any ruder and less discriminating assault 
on that which men have hitherto believed, and which, how- 
ever mixed up with falsehood and fraud, has yet been all 
whereby they have holden on to a higher world, — any such 
attack, even when it seems most successful, may be full of 
the utmost peril for them whom we thus coarsely seek to 
benefit, and with these unskilful hands to deliver. For, indeed, 
there is no office more delicate, no task needing greater wisdom 
and patience and love, than to set men free from their supersti- 
tions, and yet, with this, not to lay waste in their hearts the 
very soil in which the Truth should strike its roots — to disen- 



THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCRIPTURE. 125 

tangle the tree from the ivy which was strangling it, without, 
in the process and together with the strangling ivy, destroy- 
ing also the very life of the tree itself, which we designed 
to save. Where this process of men's extrication from error 
has been rudely or unwisely carried out, either by their own 
fault or that of others, where they have been urged to rise 
up in scorn, and to trample upon their past selves, and all 
that in time past they have held in honour, how mournful 
frequently the final issue ! Thus, how unable do we often 
prove to retain the converts from Eomanism which we have 
won. They do not return to that which they have left, but 
they pass on, they pass through the Truth into error on the 
other side. They pass from darkness into the sunlight, and 
that sunlight scarcely gilds and brightens them for an in- 
stant, ere they glide into another and thicker darkness again ; 
scarcely are they in the secure haven a moment, ere they put 
forth, as though incapable of enjoying its repose, among the 
shoals and eddies once more. 

And so, too, the Hindoo children in our Indian schools, 
when we have gathered them there, and shown them in the 
light of modern philosophy, the utter absurdity and incohe- 
rence of their sacred books, and provoked them to throw 
uttermost scorn on these, we yet may not have brought them 
even into the vestibule of the Faith, rather may have set them 
at a greater distance than ever; for to have taught them to 
pour contempt on all with which hitherto they have linked 
feelings of sacredness and awe, is but a questionable prepara- 
tion for making them humble and reverent scholars of 
Christ. Wiser surely was St. Paul's method, who ever 
sought a ground common to himself and him whom he would 
persuade, though it were but a handbreadth, upon which to 
take his stand — who taught men reverently to handle their 
past selves and their past beliefs, — who to the Athenians 
said, " Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I 
unto you," and spake of the Cretan poet as " a prophet of 

11* 



126 LECTURE VIII. 

their own j" who re-adopted into the family of the Truth its 
lost and wandering children, however they might have forgot- 
ten their true descent, in whatever far land, under whatever 
unlikely disguises, he found them. Thus, and because he 
thus dealt, he became, in the language of a Greek father, 
which contains scarcely an exaggeration, the w^aycoyoj tys 
oLxovfWETtf, he who led up the world as a bride unto Christ. 

But I must draw my subject to an end, and with a few 
general remarks on the aim and scope of what here 1 have 
been permitted to deliver, will conclude. My purpose has 
been, as I trust even they may have gathered who have heard 
but a part, and that the latest, of these discourses, to bring 
out an inner witness for Scripture from that which, to an 
earnest and devout examination, it shows itself as fitted for 
doing — from that which it has already done — from that 
which we may believe it will accomplish yet. And this 
subject I have chosen out of those which were before me, 
because truly there is great strength and comfort and assu- 
rance for us in these evidences for the things that we have 
believed, which are drawn, not from without, but from with- 
in — from their inner glory, their manifest fitness. Thus, 
for example, if gainsayers at any time should adduce appa- 
rent disagreements between one Gospel and one book of 
history and another, as between Matthew and Luke, Chroni- 
cles and Kings, and seek to trouble and perplex us with 
these, surely the true way to meet them were to bring first 
the whole question into a higher court. Let us put rather 
the question to be resolved as this, in what traceable con- 
nexion do these books, each by itself, each in relation to the 
whole of the other books, stand to the great purpose of God 
with humanity? Can they be shown evidently to form 
integral parts of a mightier whole ? Do they reveal the 
Name of God ? Do they yield their nourishment for the 
divine life of man ? Have they yielded such for our own ? 



THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF SCULPTURE. 12 7 

And then — not indeed to refuse entering into those lower 
and merely critical questions of detail ; but if it has been 
found that the book satisfies higher needs, fulfils loftier 
requirements — claiming for it on the score of this, the entire, 
the trustful confidence of faith, that it will justify itself in 
all lesser matters, that it will come out as clear, and clean in 
theni) as in its greater purpose and aim. Here too that 
word will hold good, " He that believeth shall not make 
haste." He will be content to wait. For what weakness 
does it manifest, what inner mistrust of the things which we 
have believed, how feebly must we hold them, how little can 
they have blest us, when we raise a cry of fear at any new 
and startling results to which science or criticism may have, 
or may seem to have, arrived. These too, will presently be 
shown what they are ; if true, they will fall into their place, 
and that place a place of 'subjection to revealed Truth: if 
false, however noisy now, however threatening to carry the 
whole world before them, will vanish away in a little while. 
But to dread any thing, to wish that any thing which has been 
patiently sought or honestly won, should be ignored or kept 
back, betrays an extreme weakness ; Christ has not laid his 
hand on us with power, or we should not be so easily 
persuaded to believe his cause tottering, or his Truth endan- 
gered. 

And, indeed, as regards aught which may be brought for- 
ward with purposes hostile to the Faith, may not the past 
well give us confidence for the future ? One and another 
adversary has risen up ) for what has not the world beheld 
in this kind ? Essays on the Miracles, Ages of Reason, 
Lives of Jesus, Theories of Creation. And then, in the 
first deceitful flush of a momentary success, oftentimes the 
cry has gone forth, It is finished ; and the fortress of the 
Faith is held to be so fatally breached, as henceforward to 
be untenable, and its defenders to have nothing more to do 
than to lay down their arms, and surrender at discretion. And 



128 LECTURE VIII. 

already those that dwell upon the earth begin to make merry 
over the slain witnesses ) and already the new Diocletians rear 
their trophies and stamp their medals, the memorials of an 
extinguished Faith — they themselves being about to perish 
for ever, and that Faith to go forward to new victories. For 
anon the floods retreat ; and temple and tower of God, round 
whose bases those waters raged and foamed and fretted for 
an instant, stand calmly and strongly as ever they did before. 
We, too, some of us have heard, and probably we shall hear 
again, such premature hymns of an imaginary triumph. 
And when such are confidently raised, the unstable are per- 
plexed, and the waverers fall off, and seeds of doubt, to be 
reaped in a harvest of weakness, are sown in many minds. 
But let us, brethren, have a sanctuary to retreat to, till each 
such tyranny is overpast, as overpass it surely and shortly 
will. Let us have that immediate syllogism of the heart, 
against which no argument is good. Let us be able to say, 
These words, we have found them words of healing, words 
of eternal life. This is our sole security — to have tasted 
the good Word, to have known the powers of the world to 
come. And what if Theology may not be able, on the 
instant, to solve every difficulty, yet Faith will not therefore 
abandon one jot or tittle of that which she holds, for she has 
it on another and a surer tenure, she holds it directly from 
her God. 



THE END OF THE LECTURES FOR 1845. 



CHE1ST THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS; 

• OR, 

THE UNCONSCIOUS PROPHECIES OF HEATHENDOM. 

BEING 

THE HULSEAN LECTURES 

FOR THE YEAR MDCCCXLVI. 



CHRIST THE DESIRE OF ALL NATIONS, OR THE UNCON^ 
SCIOUS PROPHECIES OF HEATHENDOM. 



LECTURE I. 

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 

HAGGAI II. 7. 

The Desire of all nations shall come. 

Although the Founder of these Lectures, which it is 
permitted me a second time to deliver in this place, did by 
no means offer a narrow range of subjects, from which the 
preacher should make his choice, but on the contrary, so 
expressed himself, that it would be quite possible to adhere 
to the letter of his injunctions, and still, at the same time, 
altogether to quit the region of Christian apology ; yet I 
cannot but believe that in so doing I should be forsaking 
the spirit of these injunctions, and hardly fulfilling the inten- 
tions with which these Lectures were founded by him. Those 
who have gone before me in this honourable office, arguing, 
probably, from the subjects which he has placed in the fore- 
most rank ; from the purpose which kindred foundations, by 
him established among uSj were evidently meant to serve; from 
the especial importance attached by good men in the age 
wherein he lived, to such defences of our holy faith, have gene- 
rally concluded that they should best be fulfilling his inten- 
tion, to which they felt a pious reverence was due, if they 
undertook the maintenance of some portions of the truth, 
which had been especially assailed or gainsayed. Nor do I 
purpose, on the present occasion, to depart from the practice 
which the example of my predecessors has sanctioned; having 

(131) 



132 LECTURE I. 

rather chosen for my argument a subject recommending 
itself to me, first, by a certain suitableness, as I trust will 
appear, to our present needs, and to controversies of our day, 
such as are approaching, if we were not actually in the midst 
of them as yet ; and secondly, by an evident bearing which 
it has upon one of the two great branches of study cultivated 
among us in this University. Christ the Desire of all Nations, 
or, The Unconscious Prophecies of Heathendom — such appears 
to me the title which will best gather up and present at a 
single glance to you the subject, which it will be my aim in 
the following discourses, if God will, under successive aspects 
to unfold. 

Leaving aside, as not belonging to my argument, what 
there was of positive divinely constituted preparation for the 
coming of Christ in the Jewish economy, I shall make it 
my task to trace what in my narrow limits I may, of the 
implicit expectations which there were in the heathen world 
— to contemplate, at least under a few leading aspects, the 
yearnings of the nations for a redeemer, and for all which 
the true Redeemer only could give, — for the great facts of 
his life, for the great truths of his teaching. Nor may this 
be all : for this, however interesting in itself, would yet 
scarcely come under the title of Christian apology; of which 
the idea is, that it is not merely the truth, but the truth 
asserting itself in the face of error. It will therefore be my 
elWeavour further to rescue these dim prophetic anticipations 
of the heathen world from the abuse which has sometimes 
been made of them, to show that these dreams of the world, 
so far from helping to persuade us that all which we hold is a 
dream likewise, are rather exactly that which ought to have 
preceded the world's awaking : that these parhelions do not 
proclaim every thing else to be an optical illusion, but 
announce, and witness for, a sun that is travelling into sight; 
that these false ancilia of man's forging, tell of a true which 
has indeed come down from heaven. I would fain show 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 133 

that there ought to have been these ; the transcending worth 
and dignity of the Christian revelation not being diminished 
by their existence, but rather enhanced; for its glory lies, 
not in its having relation to nothing which went before itself, 
but rather in its having relation to every thing, in its being 
the middle point to which all lines, some consciously, more 
unconsciously, were tending, and in which all centred at 
the last. 

And this it is worth our while to show : for we do not 
here, as the charge has sometimes been made against us, first 
set up the opponent, — whom we afterwards easily overthrow, 
for he was but the phantom of our own brain. On the con- 
trary, it has been at divers times from the very first, and 
is in our own day, a part, and a favourite part, of their 
tactics who would resist the Faith, to endeavour to rob it • 
of its significance as the great epoch in the world's history, 
by the production of anterior parallels to it. 

These may be parallels to its doctrines and ethical pre- 
cepts ; and they are brought forward for the purpose of 
showing that it is therefore no such wisdom of God, no such 
mystery that had been kept secret from the beginning of the 
world j that what it professed to give as a revelation from heaven, 
men had attained before by the light of reason, by the un- 
assisted efforts of their own minds. The attempts to rob 
Christianity in this way of its significance are, as I observed, 
not new. If such objections have been zealously urged in 
modern times, they belong also to the very earliest. To 
take two examples, one old, one new. Celsus, in the second 
century, quoting words of our blessed Lord's, in which he 
exhorts to the forgiveness of enemies, remarks that he has 
found the identical precept in Plato, — with only the differ- 
ence, as he dares to add, that it is by the Grecian sage better 
and more elegantly spoken.* And Gibbon, having occasion 

* Origen, Con. Cels., 1. 7, c. 58. In like manner Celsus affirmed 
that our Lord's words, Matt. xix. 23, were transferred from 

12 



|34 LECTURE I. 

to speak of one of Christ's most memorable moral precepts, 
"Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye 
even so to them," cannot resist the temptation of adding— 
"a rule which I read in a moral treatise of Isocrates four 
hundred years before the publication of the Gospel." And 
in like manner we all probably remember, if not the con- 
tents yet the title which the book of an English deist bore, 
one of the ablest of that unhappy band, « Christianity as 
old as the Creation f a book which by that title at once 
indicated the quarter from which its author advanced to the 
assault of revealed religion. 

And not seldom this charge appears in an aggravated 
form j and it has been sought to be proved, not merely that 
others had said the same before the Gospel, but that it had 
covertly borrowed from them-that so far from being more 
and higher than another birth of the human mind, it pos- 
sessed °so little vital and independent energy, as to have been 
" compelled to go back to prior sources, and to build with the 
materials of others, and to adorn itself with their spoils. 
Uro-ed by their desire to prove this, hoping to convict it thus 
of being in possession of things not its own, the adversaries 
of the Christian faith have gone far to seek for the anticipa- 
tions and sources of its dpctrine. Thus, with Voltaire, India, 

Plato, De Leffff., L 5. 742. (Con. Cels., 1. 6., c. 16.) Augustine 
too (De Docir. Christ, 1. 2, c. 28) makes mention of some m his own 
time readers and lovers of Plato -qui dicere ausi sunt omnes 
Domini nostri Jesu Christ! sententias, quas mirari et prsedicare 
coguntur, de Platonis libris eum didicisse. St. Ambrose also, as we 
learn from Augustine, (Ep. 31,) had found it necessary to write 
against such ; which he did in a work that now has perished. How 
excellent is Augustine's own answer (Enarr. in Ps. cxl. 6 :] Dixit 
hoc Pythagoras, dixit hoc Plato.... Propterea si inventus fuerit aliquis 
eorum hoc dixisse quod dixit et Christus, gratulamur iUi, non 
sequimur ilium. Sed prior fuit ille quam Christus. Si quis vera 
loquitur, prior est quam ipsa Veritas? homo, attende Christum 
non quando ad te venerit, sed quando te fecerit. 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 135 

and still more, China, were the favourite quarters from which 
he laboured to show that its wisdom had been drawn; 
although his almost incredible ignorance exposed him to the 
most ridiculous errors, and made him the dupe of poorest 
forgeries, palmed on him as works of the ancient wisdom of 
the East, and which by him were again confidently produced 
as such.* Somewhat later the Zend-Avesta and the religion 
of Zoroaster were triumphantly appealed to, as having been 
the true sun from which the borrowed light of Judaism and 
Christianity had proceeded. Then again, men said that our 
blessed Lord had been educated and initiated in the secret 
lore of the Essenes, and that he, the Wisdom of God, had 
first learned wisdom in these schools of men. Or by others, 
Rabbinical parallels to various sayings in the New Testament, 
to evangelical parables and doctrines, have been solemnly 
adduced, as solving the riddle of Christianity, as enough to 
dissipate that nimbus of glory with which it had been hither- 
to surrounded, to refute its loftier claims, and prove its 
origin of earth, and not of heaven. So has falsehood 
travelled round the world, as inconsistent with itself as it 
is remote from the truth, each later birth of it devouring 
the preceding. 

* There is a curious account of a fraud which was played off on 
him, in Von Bohlen's Das Alte Indien, v. 1, p. 136, connecting itself 
with a singular piece of literary forgery. A Jesuit missionary, 
whose zeal led him to assume the appearance of an Indian Fakir, in 
the beginning of last century forged a Veda, of which the purpose 
was, secretly to undermine the religion which it professed to sup- 
port, and so to facilitate the introduction of Christianity — to advance, 
that is, the kingdom of truth with a lie. This forged Veda is full 
of every kind of error or ignorance in regard to the Indian religions. 
After lying, however, long in a Romanist missionary college at 
Pondicherry, it found its way to Europe, and a transcript of it came 
into the hands of Voltaire, who eagerly used it for the purpose of 
depreciating the Christian Books, and showing how many of their 
doctrines had been anticipated by the wisdom of the East. The book 
had thus an end worthy of its beginning. 



136 LECTURE I. 

And they have wrought in the same spirit, and in reality 
•with the same weapons to the same ends, who yet, somewhat 
shifting their ground, have not so much sought to turn our 
Christian faith into a doctrine which had been often taught 
before, as into a dream which has been often dreamed before ; 
who have not therefore laboured to produce parallels to its 
isolated sayings or doctrines — to rob it here and there of a 
jewel in its crown; but have aspired to a completer victory, 
striking at the very person and acts of Him on whom it rests, 
and out of whom it has unfolded itself. And in this way ; 
— they have ransacked all records of ancient religions for 
such parallels, nearer or more remote, as they could in 
them find, not now any more to the sayings, but rather to 
the doings, of this life ; and having mustered and marshalled 
in threatening order as many of these as they could draw 
together, they have turned round and said to us — " In all 
times, and all the world through, men have been imagining 
for themselves, as you see,_sons of Cod, expiations by sacri- 
fice, direct communications with a higher world, oracles and 
prophecies, wielders of a power mightier than nature's, re- 
storers of a lost Paradise, conquerors of Hades, ascensions 
into heaven. They have imagined them, and nothing more; 
for the things which they thus in spirit grasped at, never 
found an historic realization, however men may have enriched 
themselves, and we do not deny that they did so, with the 
thought that such things had been, or one day should be." 
And then it has been further asked us, What right had we to 
difference our hope from the hope of all others? They 
longed so earnestly, that at last their longing wove a garment, 
made even a body, for itself; what right have any to affirm 
that it is otherwise with the things which they believe ? 

And thus, because men have hoped for, and reached after, 
that which in Christ is given, and hoped so intensely, that 
they have sometimes imagined it to be actually theirs, so pro- 
jecting their hope, as to give it at last an objective reality, 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 137 

we are bidden to believe that ours is but such an ardent 
desire, fashioning at length a body for itself. Parading a 
long line of shadows, these adversaries require us to acknow- 
ledge the substance we have embraced to be a shadow also; 
showing how much false money is in the world, and has at 
different times passed current, they demand of us, how we 
dare to assume that which we have accepted to be true ; — 
when they should see that the shadows imply a substance 
somewhere, that the false money passes only under shelter 
of a true. Proving, as it is not hard to prove, those parallels 
to be groundless and mythical, to rest on no true historic 
basis, they hope that the great facts of the Christian's belief 
will be concluded to be as weak — that they will be involved 
in a common discredit* — and the faiths of which those other 
formed a part having come to nothing, or evidently hasten- 
ing to decay, that this may be assumed to underlie the same 
judgment, and to be hastening to the same inevitable dis- 
solution, however the signs of it as yet may not appear. 

This scheme of attack has been so long and so vigorously 
plied, so much success has been expected from it, that in 
the works of the latter assailants of revelation from this 
quarter, there speaks out a certain indignation, mingled with 
astonishment, at the resistance which it is still presuming to 
offer ; as though it were not to be endured, that every other 
religion should have confessed itself a mythology, and that 
this should deny it still — that each other, like a startled 
ghost, should have vanished at the first cock-crowing of an 

* Tertullian (Apol. 47,) speaks of the way in which these paral- 
lels were played oif against the Christian verities — Elysium not only 
having forfeited belief in itself, but having helped to destroy a 
belief in heaven — Minos and tlhadamanthus having rendered the 
judgment-seat of Christ a mockery ; — though in his narrow fashion 
he sees in them nothing but the adulteria veritatis — the work of 
the jealous envy of evil spirits, quae de similitudine fidem infirma- 
rent veritatis. But if the truth was hard to receive with these, 
might it not have been impossible to receive without them ? 

12* 



138 LECTURE I. 

intellectual morn, but that this should continue to affront, as 
boldly and as confidently as ever, even the light of the 
world's middle day — that each other should have crumbled 
into nothing at the first touch of the wand of a critical 
philosophy, but that this should entirely refuse to obey its 
dissolving spell. 

Now all charges against the truth, however destitute of 
any solid foundation, out of whatever perversity of heart or 
mind they may have sprung, yet, when continually re-appear- 
ing, when repeating themselves in different ages, and by the 
mouths of different objectors, and those independent of one 
another, have yet, we may be sure, something which has ren- 
dered them not merely possible, but plausible ; which sug- 
gested them first, and, with the frivolous and thoughtless, 
with those that have been eager to believe them, and to be 
quit of the restraints of a positive faith, has given them cur- 
rency and favour. Let me seek, then, as an important ele- 
ment of my subject, to consider what that something is, 
which has served to suggest, and afterwards to give a point 
to these charges ; and, not pausing here, to show that the 
truth, which, however distorted, is at the bottom of these 
charges, is one which we may cheerfully and without any 
misgiving, recognise. 

And this is not all : for I would fain also show that it 
would be a grievous deficiency, if that were absent from our 
Christian faith, which has been the motive and hint to these 
accusations — if that faith, as far as regards the whole ante- 
rior world except the Jewish, stood in relation to nothing 
which men had thought, or felt, or hoped, or believed; 
with no other coefficient but the Jewish, and resting on no 
broader historic basis than that would supply. It will be my 
purpose to inquire whether we may not contemplate the rela- 
tions of the absolute truth to the anterior religions of the 
world, in an aspect in which we shall cease altogether from 
regarding with suspicion these apparent anticipations of good 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 139 

things given us in Christ, in which, instead of being secretly 
embarrassed by them, and hardly knowing exactly how to 
deal with, or where to range them, we shall joyfully accept 
these presentiments of the truth, so far as they are satis- 
factorily made out, as enhancing the greatness and glory of 
the truth itself ; and as being, so far as they are allowed to 
have any weight, confirmations of it. 

Nor will it be a small satisfaction, — if this be possible, as 
I believe it easy, — to make our adversaries do drudging 
work for us; to plough with their oxen; to enter, as we 
shall do then, upon their labours; and all that they have 
painfully gathered up with purposes hostile to the faith — to 
appropriate and make defensive of it; not so much anx- 
iously defending our own position, as confidently turning 
theirs ; wresting from them their own weapons, and then 
wielding them against themselves. 

And first, in regard to the ethical anticipations of what 
is given to us in the gospel, — the goodly maxims, the strik- 
ing precepts, the memorable sayings, which are gathered 
from the fields of heathen philosophy, and then sometimes 
used to depress the original worth of the teaching of Christ 
and his apostles, — I will not urge here, and I have no object 
in urging, though I may, in passing, remark, how many that 
are sometimes adduced of these are wholly deceptive, as paral- 
lels to Christian truths. How often in their organic con- 
nexion they would be very far from containing that echo or 
presentiment of truth which we deem we catch in them; 
how often they have indeed a very different significance from 
that which we first put in them, and only afterwards educe 
from them. Nor yet will I press how the goodliest maxim 
is indeed nothing, save in its coherence to a body of truth; 
how a world of such maxims, were they gotten -together, 
would be only as ten thousand artificial lamps, failing alto- 
gether to constitute a day, and not in the remotest degree 



140 LECTURE I. 

doing the work, or supplying to the world the place of a 
single sun. 

Not to press this, and accepting fully and freely what has 
been said wisely and well before the gospel and apart from 
the gospel, and allowing to the full that it has many times 
touched the heart of the matter, yet still is there nothing 
here which we need wish we could deny, which we should not 
rather desire to find. Indeed, so far from there having been, 
in time past, a shunning or ignoring of these heathen paral- 
lels, the early apologists perhaps only admitted them too' 
freely : yet thus at any rate they testified that to acknowledge 
them they felt to be no confession of a weakness in their 
position. Thus more than one has likened the faithful de- 
livered from an evil world to the children of Israel brought 
out of Egypt, who borrowed and carried forth from thence 
vessels of gold and vessels of silver, the same which proba- 
bly afterwards furnished the precious metals which they dedi- 
cated to the holier uses of the sanctuary. In like manner, 
they said, there was much which the faithful, delivered out 
of the spiritual Egypt, would leave behind him, as all its 
abominable idolatries ; but something also which he would 
carry forth, and which he had a right to carry forth, for it 
was not truly the riches of that land. This silver and this 
gold had been originally dug from mines of divine truth, 
and bearing it with him, he only reclaimed to its noblest pur- 
poses that which had been more or less alienated and per- 
verted from them.* 

* Thus Augustine (De Doctr. Christ, 1. 2, c. 40:) Philosophi au- 
tern qui vocantur, si qua forte vera et fidei nostras accommodata dix- 
erunt maxime Platonici, non solum formidanda non sunt, sed ab eis 
etiam tanquam injustis possessoribus in usum nostrum vindicanda. 
Sicut enim iEgyptii non solum idola habebant et onera gravia, quae 
populus Israel detestaretur et fugaret, sed etiam vasa atque ornamen- 
ta de auro et argento, et vestem, quae ille populus exiensde iEgyptQ 
sibi potius tanquam ad usum meliorem clanculo vindicavit, nonauc- 
toritate propria, sed praecepto Dei, ipsis iEgyptiis nescienter com- 



i 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 141 

Nor need we deal more timidly with these parallels than 
they did. So long, indeed, as we regard God's revelation 
of Himself in Christ, as a revelation merely of certain mor- 
al truths, it may be startling to find aught that is therein 
anticipated in any other quarter. But when we more right- 
ly contemplate it as the manifesting of life, that the Life was 
manifested, and dwelt among us, then we feel that they who 
gave, and could give, precepts and maxims only, however 
precious these were, whatever witness they bore to a light 
shining in the darkness, to a divine spark not trodden out in 
man, to a God nurturing the hea,then, with all this yet gave 
not that, which, for man, is the gift of gifts and blessing of 
blessings. And this is the true way in which to contemplate 
it. That which differences Christianity from all other religions, 
is not its theory of morals; this is a most real, yet at the 
same time only a relative difference, for there were ethics be- 
fore there were Christian ethics.* But its difference is, that 

modantibus ea, quibus non bene utebantur, sic doctrinee omnes Gen- 
tilium non solum simulata et superstitiosa figmenta gravesque sax*- 
cinas supervacui laboris habent, .... sed etiam liberales disciplinas 
usuiveritatisaptiores, . . . quodeorum, tanquam aurum etargentum, 
quod non ipsi instituerunt, sed de quibusdam quasi metallis divinse 
providentise, quse ubique infusa sunt, eruerunt, .... debet ab eis au- 
ferre Christianus ad usum justum prEedicandi Evangeiii. Origen 
(Ep. ad Gregor., t. 1, p. 30,) uses the same illustration, observing, 
however, that, according to his experience, the gold that is brought 
out of Egypt is oftener used for the fashioning of an idol, a golden 
calf, the work of men's own hands, which they worship, than for 
the adorning of the tabernacle of God. 

* Grotius, indeed, says, (J)e Verit. Ret. Christ., 1. 4, c. 12 :) Ejus 
[scil. religionis Christianas] partes singular tantee sunt honestatis, 
ut suapte luce animos quasi convincant, ita ut inter paganos non de- 
fuerint qui dixerint singula, qua nostras religio habet universa. Lac- 
tantius expresses himself more cautiously, and is careful to add how 
none but a teacher sent from God could have knit these scattered 
limbs into a body. He says, Inst. Div.,l. 7, c. 7: Nullam sectam 
fuisse tarn deviam, nee philosophorum quendam tarn inanem qui non 



142 LECTURE I, 

it is life and power, that it transforms, that it transfigures, 
that it makes new creatures, that it does for all what others 
only promised to do for a few. Herein the essential differ- 
ence resides. Men, for instance, before it came, could speak 
worthy things, and could really feel them, about the duty 
of overcoming their desires, of forgiving their enemies, of 
repaying injuries with kindness, of coming to G-od with clean 
hands and a clean heart. Such sayings abound in every code of 
morals :* but the unhappiness was, that they who uttered these 
sayings and they who admired them, did little more than this. 
It was not that there was any falseness in their admiration: they 
delighted in them after the inner man, but in the actual strug- 
gle with evil, they were ever weak to bring them to effect. 
There was a great gulf between the saying and the doing, which 
never till in Christ was effectually bridged over; so that the 
Christian speaker in that beautiful dialogue, the Octavius of 
Minucius Felix, exactly hit the mark, when, to characterize 
the practical of Christian life as distinguished from the spec- 
ulative of heathen philosophy, he exclaimed of that sect ev- 
erywhere spoken against, to which he belonged, Non eloqui- 
mur magna, sed vivimus. 

And yet, brethren, when we thus trace the miserable contra- 
diction that ever existed in a world out of Christ, between 
the good seen and the evil done, the vast chasm between the 
two, let this be with no purpose of laying bare their sores, 
with no thought of glorying in their infirmities, to whom in 
a less favored time the only fountain of effectual strength 

videret aliquid e vero. Quodsi extitisset aliquis, qui veritatem, 
sparsam per singulos, per sectasque diffusam, colligeret in unum, 
et redigeret in corpus, is profectd non dissentiret a nobis. Sed hoc 
nemo facere, nisi veri peritus ac sciens, potest ; verum autem non 
nisi ejus scire est, qui sit doctus a Deo. 

* See, for instance, in Von Bohlen, (Das Alte Indien, v. 1, p. 364,) 
a beautiful collection of Indian sayings of this kind, on the love of 
our neighbour, and the forgiveness of injuries. 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 143 

and healing had not yet been opened. For indeed, breth- 
ren, may there not be many a one among ourselves to whom, 
with far less excuse, all this explains itself, alas ! only too 
easily ? many a one, it may be, who remembers times of his 
own life, before his moral convictions had been gathered up 
and. found their middle point in Christ — and in those times 
repeated falls under temptation, which explain to him only 
too vividly the condition in which this ever-recurring infidel- 
ity of men to their moral convictions found place — in which 
they were thus able to trace the outlines of a righteousness, 
but impotent to fill them up, and so ever leaving it in out- 
line still — well-skilled to draw a ground-plan, but weak to 
build any superstructure thereon — the virtue loved till the op- 
portunity came for practising it; the sin hated, till the mo- 
ment for testifying that hatred had arrived. 

But to pass on to the other charge, to the resemblances to 
the great facts on which our faith reposes, to the great events 
of our Lord's life, which are adduced from other quarters, 
with the requirement, because those have proved weak to 
stand, that we should acknowledge these to be weak also )— 
they only will consent to such a conclusion, who have failed 
to perceive that according to the very highest idea of Chris- 
tianity, such there needs must have been. For what do we 
affirm of Christ ? when do we conceive worthily of Him ? 
When we conceive of Him, in the prophet's words, as "the 
Desire of all nations" — the fulfiller of the world's hopes — 
the stiller of creation's groans — the great birth of time, unto 
which all the unspeakable throes of a suffering humanity had 
been tending from the first. These resemblances disturb us 
not at all, — they are rather most welcome ; for we do not be- 
lieve the peculiar glory of what in Christ we possess to con- 
sist in this, that it is unlike everything else, " the cold deni- 
al and contradiction of all that men have been dreaming of 
through the different ages of the world, but rather the sweet 
reconciliation and exquisite harmony of all past thoughts, an- 



144 LECTURE T. 

ticipations, revelations." Its prerogative is, that all whereof 
men had a troubled dream before, did in him become a waking 
reality ; that what men were devising, and most inadequately, 
for themselves, Grod has perfectly given us in his Son j that 
in the room of shifting cloud-palaces, with their mockery of 
temple and tower, stands for us a city, which hath come down 
from Heaven, but whose foundations rest upon this earth of 
ours ;— that we have divine facts — facts no doubt which are 
ideal, in that they are the vehicle of everlasting truths; his- 
tory indeed which is far more than history, for it embodies 
the largest and most continually recurring thoughts which 
have stirred the bosom of humanity from the beginning. We 
say that the divine ideas which had wandered up and down 
the world till oftentimes they had well-nigh forgotten them- 
selves and their own origin, did at length clothe themselves 
in flesh and blood ; they became incarnate with the Incar- 
nation of the Son of God. In his life and person the idea 
and the fact at length kissed each other, and were hencefor- 
ward wedded for evermore. 

If these things be so, and it will be my desire in this place, 
and in these lectures, to trace how they are, one or two con- 
siderations will lie very near to us ; and with the pressing of 
these on your thoughts and hearts I will this day conclude. 
And first, the general consideration, that what there may 
have been in the world obscurely struggling to be Christian 
before Christ and his Church, so far from suggesting to 
us poorer thoughts of what in him we possess, under how 
far more glorious aspect does it present that to us ! All 
which men before could conceive, but could not realize, could 
feel after, but could not grasp, could dream of, but ever when 
they awoke found nothing in their hands, it is here ; " the 
body is of Christ." And the Church which he has founded, 
we behold it as sitting upon many waters, upon the great 
ocean of truth, from whence every stream that has at all, or 
at any time refreshed the earth was originally drawn, and to 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 145 

which it duteously brings its waters again.* We may con- 
template that Church as having in that it has the Word and 
Spirit of its Lord, the measure of all partial truth in itself; 
receiving the homage of all human systems, meekly, and yet, 
lkie a queen, as her right ; understanding them far better 
than they ever understood themselves ; disallowing their false, 
and what of true they have, setting her seal upon that true, 
and issuing it with a brighter image, and a sharper outline, 
and a more paramount authority, from her own mint. 

Again, if the more excellent glory of that which we pos- 
sess in Christ is, that it is not shadow but substance, not 
anticipation but possession — not the idea, but the fact, or 
rather the fact and the idea in one, — how are we letting go our 
most precious gains, when we at all let go, or when we even 
slight, our historic faith, resting on and finding its object in 
the person of the Saviour ! What a miserable exchange, to 
give up this, and to accept the largest, the most vaunted 
theories concerning the godlike and the true in its room and 
as its adequate substitute, the most magnificent ideas in the 
place of the humblest affiance on the Son of God — soon to 
find that we have gotten pebbles for jewels, words for things, 
that we are in a world peopled only with ghosts and phan- 
toms ! Oh, loss unutterable, if we allow any to strip off for 
us the historic realization of the truth in the person of Jesus 
of Nazareth, as though it were not of the essence of the 
matter, as though it were a thing indifferent, useful perhaps 
for the simpler members of the Church, but for others hinder- 
ing rather than helping the contemplation of the pure idea, 
which they would persuade us it is alone needful to retain. 
They promise, it is true, who invite to this sacrifice, that if 
only we will destroy this temple of our historic faith, in three 

* Clement of Alexandria on this very matter (Strom., 1. 1, c. 5 :) 
Mux [A.sv ovv Tfijs aX^foiaj 686$' aXX zls actriv xaOdrtsp £tj atvvaov 
rtotafxov, ixpiovGc to, ptldpo. ofcka. a.7Jko9sv. 

13 



146 LECTURE I. 

days, yea, in an instant, as by a magic wand, they will raise 
up for us a goodlier and more gorgeous fabric in its room. 
Let it be our wisdom to give no credence to their words ; 
knowing this, that it was the very blessedness which .the 
coming of the Son of Grod in the flesh brought us, that it 
brought us that, which these would fain persuade us to re- 
linquish and renounce, that it lifted men out of and above 
•that condition into which these deceivers would willingly 
persuade them to return. 

No doubt there is a temptation to give in to this, a temp- 
tation working in each one of us — to take up, that is, with 
a religion which shall consist in the contemplating of great 
and ennoblin gideas, instead of in the serving with a straight- 
forward and downright obedience a personal God. Those 
ideas we feel that we can deal with them as we like ) they 
exert no constraining power upon us ; we are their masters, 
and not they ours : or if we have allowed them any rule over 
us, when the stress comes, we can withdraw it again ; allow- 
ing them just as much authority as is convenient to us. 
There is no " Be thou holy, for I am holy," in them — no 
pointing to the rugged way of the Cross, with a Forerunner 
walking there, and a command that we follow him in it. 
Let us watch earnestly against so subtle a temptation, show- 
ing as it does so fair, and finding so much in our slothful and 
sinful hearts that makes them only too ready to embrace it. 

And surely, brethren, at this season the Church suggests 
and presents to us mighty helps against all this. What help 
so effectual as to enter truly and deeply into the Passion of 
our Lord — to carry at no cold and careless distance from that 
cross to which each day of this lenten season is now bring- 
ing us nigher ? but to seek to draw forth the riches of grace 
which are laid up for us in it, and in the considering of him 
that hanged thereon. Let us determine, brethren, that in 
this coming week, the beginning it may be of a more holy 
life, we will bring ourselves continually within the sphere of 



INTRODUCTORY LECTURE. 147 

those mighty, those transforming influences, which are ever 
going forth from thence. Let us make proof how it can open 
for us the fountain of purifying tears, sealed it may be 
for long — how a burden can be laid down at its foot which 
is crushing us to the earth, and from which nowhere' else is 
deliverance. Let us seek to enter into nearer fellowship 
with the Man of sorrows, with our crucified God. And then, 
when we have proved how this fellowship can bless us, how 
it can cleanse us from our impurities, how it can strengthen 
us for our tasks, can enable us to tread under foot our ene- 
mies, we shall not readily exchange such a fellowship as this 
with a living Lord, so full fraught with blessings, for that of 
mere notions and phantoms; which, however much they 
may promise, will desert us iD the hour of need, and prove 
utterly helpless, whensoever the real stress of life's trial 
comes. 



LECTUKE II. 

THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 
(Preached on Easter Sunday.) 

Mark XVI. 3. 

Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre ? 

The heathen expectations of a deliverer I ventured in my 
preceding lecture to characterize as " the unconscious proph- 
ecies of heathendom ;" — prophecies indeed which knew not 
at what they pointed, of which the lines were most wavering 
and indistinct when set beside the clear outlines of Jewish 
hope — yet in a wider and laxer sense prophecies still; or, if 
we will not make that word common, but reserve it for the 
highest of all, we may call them the world's divination at the 
least. For in these expectations of a world, which, though 
deeply fallen, remained God's world still, it was divining 
what it needed, and obscurely feeling after it. And this div- 
ination, these guesses at and Teachings out after, the truth, so 
far from shunning and keeping out of sight, we may use, I 
said, not of course putting them in the forefront of our ar- 
ray, yet we may use them still, as arguments for that Faith, 
to which all has thus tended from the first, which the world 
was craving for before it received, and short of which it 
never found its perfect satisfaction or rest- 
It is the same' argument, applied in a different region, of 
Christianity as evidently the complement of all that went 
before, which the early apologists were wont to use in their 
conflict with Gnostic and Manichasan. They urged the man- 
ner in which the Christian revelation as the Church received 
(148) 



THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 149 

it, rooted itself deeply in an anterior constitution, was evi- 
dently not a sudden improvisation, but the culminating fact 
of an idea which had been realizing itself through all the sa- 
cred history of the past, was as the perfect flower, of which 
all genuine Judaism had been the stalk and stem. And they 
founded on this traceable connexion the superiority of its 
claims to those of all rival systems, which could produce no 
such accordance of their new with pre-existing and pre-es- 
tablished harmonies in the spiritual world ; but had rather 
abruptly and violently to force a place for themselves, than 
to fit into one already prepared for their reception, which rested 
on an undoing and denying of the past, rather than a sanction- 
ing and perfecting of it.* And as there was, no doubt, a 
most real force in their argument, exactly so has it for the 
thoughtful mind a deep significance, that Christ should have 
met and satisfied all nobler longings of the heathen world — 
that all deeper and better impulses which were anywhere at 
work, should have been tending toward Sim. The worth of 
the unspeakable gift which in Christ is ours, is wonderfully 
testified by the fact that all should have been in one way or 
another either asking for that gift or fancying that they had 
gotten it, or mourning its departure, or providing substitutes 
for it. For, however in the one elect people, as the bearers 
of the divine promises, — the beating heart of the spiritual 
world, — the appointed interpreters to the rest of their blind 
desires, this longing after a Redeemer came out in greater 
clearness and in greater strength, and with no troubling distur- 
bing elements, — their education being far more directly from 
God, and being expressly aimed at the quickening of these 
longings to the highest, — yet were those longings themselves 

* See especially Tertullian, Adv. Marcion., 1. 3 and 4, passim, in 
which this is his ever-recurring thought, re-appearing in an infinite 
variety of forms. Oh Christum et in novis veterem ! he exclaims, 
having shown how the rudiments of almost all Christ's miracles are 
to be found in the Old Testament. 



150 LECTURE II. 

not exclusively theirs. They, indeed, yearned, and knew what 
they yearned for : the nations yearned, and knew not for 
what. But still they yearned : for as the earth in its long 
polar night seeks to supply the absence of the day by the 
generation of the northern lights, so does each people in the 
long night of its heathen darkness bring forth in its yearn- 
ing after the life of Christ, a faint and glimmering substitute 
for the same. From these dreamy longings after the break 
of day have proceeded oracles, priests, sacrifices, lawgivers 
and the like. Men have nowhere given up hoping ; nor ac- 
quiesced in the world's evil as the world's law. Everywhere 
they have had a tradition of a time when they were nearer 
to God than now, a confident hope of a time when they 
should be brought nearer again. 

No thoughtful student of the past records of mankind can 
refuse to acknowledge that through all its history there has 
run the hope of a redemption from the evil which oppresses 
it ; nor of this only, but that this hope has continually linked 
itself on to some single man. The help that is coming to 
the world, it has ever seen incorporated in a person. The 
generations of men, weak and helpless in themselves, have 
evermore been looking after one in whom they may find all 
which they seek vainly in themselves and in those around 
them — redressers of the world's wrong, deliverers from the 
world's yoke, vindicators of the honour of the race, souls of 
heroic stature, in which all the features of greatness that are 
imparted with niggard hand unto others shall be found glori- 
ously and prodigally combined.. Such in almost every reli- 
gion men have learned to look back to, as having already 
come : such we find that they are every where expecting as 
yet to appear. 

As little can one deny that there is that in men, which 
prepares them to welcome these at their appearing. There 
is a natural gravitation of souls, which attracts them to 
mighty personalities; an instinct in man, which tells him 






THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 151 

that he is never so great as when looking up to one greater 
than himself — that he is made for this looking upward — to find, 
and, finding to rejoice and to be ennobled in, a nobler than 
himself. And doubtless this instinct in itself is divine. It 
is the natural basis on which the devotion of mankind to 
Christ is by the Spirit to be built ; it is an instinct which, 
being perfectly purified of each baser admixture, is intended 
to find its entire satisfaction in Him. True it may stop short 
of Him ; true, it may turn utterly away from Him. It may 
stop short of Him, resting in human heroes, in men glorious 
for their gifts, eminent for their services to their kind; and 
wo have then the worship of genius instead of the worship 
of God. Or it may turn utterly away from Christ, and then, 
being in itself inextinguishable, and therefore surviving 
even in those who have wholly forsaken Him, it will, thus 
perverted and depraved, lay them open to all the delusions of 
false prophets and of antichrists. 

For it is this, this attraction of men to a mightier than 
themselves, which, being thus perverted, has filled the world 
with deceivers and deceived ; which has gathered round the 
hunters of men the ready instruments which have executed 
their will. It is this which has drawn souls, as moths to the 
candle, to rush into and to be scorched and to be consumed 
in the flame, which some wielder of heavenly gifts for hellish 
aims has kindled. It is this which swells the train round 
some conqueror's car, as he urges his destructive course 
through the world. What, for instance, to take a near 
illustration, was the devotedness of the French soldiery to 
their great leader but this ? Who does , not feel that this 
de.votedness, out of which thousands and tens of thousands 
were ready to meet, and did joyfully meet, dangers and fa- 
tigues and agonies and deaths, only for the hope of one word 
of approbation, one smile from him, counting all more than 
repaid by this — who does not feel that this was the inverted 
side of something in itself most true and most noble, to 



152 LECTURE II. 

which even in its degeneracy it bore witness ; and only had 
now run wild and lost its appointed destination ? It is this, 
this craving of men passionately to devote themselves to some 
one, which makes an Antichrist possible, which will make 
him so terrible when he appears — men by a just judgment 
of God being permitted to dedicate all which they ought 
to have dedicated to Christ, to his opposite, to him who 
comes in his own name, — because they refused to give it, be- 
cause they refused to give themselves, to Him who came in 
the name of his Father. It will then be fearfully seen that 
there can be an enthisiasm of hell, no less than an enthusiasm 
of heaven. 

And as on the one side there is a preparedness to acknow- 
ledge these kings of men, these spiritual and intellectual chiefs 
of our race, so soon as they show themselves ; thus too, 
upon the other hand, such have never been wanting to 
claim the reverence and the homage of their fellows, to seat 
themselves on the prepared thrones of the world. Certainly 
there is nothing in the study of the past which fills one with 
more awe and wonder than the infinite significance of single 
men in the development of the world's history. That his- 
tory lies out before our eyes no Tartarian steppe, no Indian 
savannah, stretching out at one vast level, or with only slight 
elevations or depressions ; but with marvellous inequalities, 
and here and there with ravines deep almost as hell itself, 
and again with mountain summits towering well-nigh unto 
heaven. Every where we encounter those that bring to 
their brethren a new blessing or a new curse, that gather as 
at a centre the world's light or the world's darkness; from 
whom that light, or that darkness diffuses itself anew and with 
a new energy — beneficent lords or baleful tyrants in the spi- 
ritual kingdom of men's thoughts and feelings — each one for 
weal or for woe, in narrower and wider circles, for longer or 
shorter spaces, wielding his scepter over the hearts and spirits 
of his fellows; helping to make them slaves or to make 



THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 153 

them free, to exalt or to cast them down. On the one 
side august lawgivers, founders of stable polities, bringers 
in of some new element of civilization, restorers, even 
amid heathen darkness, of some purer knowledge of God ; 
on the other side, destroyers that have known how to 
knit to them as with magic bands multitudes of their breth- 
ren, and to make them the passionate servants of their evil 
will ; proclaimers of sensual philosophies, that have assisted 
to make our life cheaper than beasts', to empty it of its loftier 
hopes and its faith in a higher destination ; seducers after 
whom the world has wondered ; stars whose name has been 
Wormwood, .that, falling from heaven, have made the waters 
of earth bitter, so that the men died who drank of them. 

Thus has it been, brethren, that the world has been ever 
opening wide its arms to welcome its redeemers, — oftentimes 
cruelly deceived, counting oftentimes, like Eve, that it had 
gotten a man from the Lord, even him who should comfort 
it under the curse, when indeed it was thus welcoming only 
the deepener of the curse, and it may be the author of some 
new mischief; yet hoping ever, with hopes that even at the 
best were only most imperfectly and inadequately fulfilled. 
Thus have the multitudes of men still gathered and grouped 
themselves round central figures in history, giving testimony 
even by an oftentimes fatal readiness for this, that mankind 
was made for a Christ, for a divine leader in whom it should be 
set free, by the mightier and holier magic of his will, by the 
prevalence of a divine attraction which he should exercise 
upon them, from all the potent spells of seducing spirits and 
seducing men — that humanity was made for one to whom it 
should be able to deliver itself perfectly and without reserve, 
and to be blest in so delivering itself. For he being identi- 
cal with righteousness, and wisdom and love, they who lose 
themselves in Him, only lose to find themselves again for 
ever. 

So much, brethren, we may say generally concerning the 



154 . LECTURE II. 

hope which the world has cherished of redeemers and sa- 
viours — a hope which at length was fulfilled so perfectly in 
Him, and only in Him, who bears both these titles, that we 
well nigh feel as if the titles themselves, to say nothing of 
any deeper homage or devotion, cannot, without wrong to 
him, and encroachment upon his due honour, be lent to any 
other. And upon this day, brethren, upon this resurrection 
morn, it will fall in well with the joyful solemnities of the 
time, with the current in which our thoughts must needs be 
running, and from which it would only be a loss if the dis- 
course you heard in this place should awhile divert them, to 
address ourselves to. a part of the subject, which, had not 
this high day come upon us, might perhaps have been more 
conveniently reserved to a later occasion ; but which if now, 
moved by the fitness of the season, I a little anticipate, you 
will pardon me this wrong. The aspect of the subject which 
I mean is this, — the world's hope of its deliverers as con- 
querors of death, its expectation of one who should lead cap- 
tivity captive, in whom mortality should be swallowed up in 
life, who should be a vanquisher of hell, a bringer back of 
souls, and first and chiefly of his own, from the prison-house 
of the grave. 

Such expectations in abundance there were ; for nowhere 
have men sat down content under the heavy laws of death 
which bound them. They have ever been imagining the re- 
versal of the curse, a breach or a repeal of those inexorable 
laws. The old world was ever feeling after "Jesus and the 
Resurrection." And being full of this thought, it traced it 
everywhere. Thus, in the cycle of the natural seasons, when 
the earth in spring starts up from its long winter sleep, men 
saw a symbol and a never-failing prophecy of life rising out 
of death : that winter was as the world's death, this spring 
as the world's resurrection. The enthusiasm which the 
spring woke up, the rapture with which the outbursting of 
bud and blossom, the signs of the reviving year were hailed 



THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 155 

— the way in which the chiefest and joyfulest feasts of al- 
most all religions were coincident with, and evidently cele- 
brated, this time, being full of this spring gladness, — all 
this was not an evidence, as some would have us to believe, 
that those religions were merely physical, did merely com- 
memorate the revolutions of the natural year. But this 
rapture and delight with which the outer tokens of renovation 
and revival were hailed, had their root in a profound and in- 
stinctive sense of the connexion between man and nature, in 
a most true feeling that the symbols of renovation in nature 
could not be aimless and unmeaning, symbols of nothing, 
but must needs point to deeper realities in the life of man.* 

* I may quote, though long, the sublime passage in Tertullian on 
the vestiges of a resurrection which we may trace everywhere in 
nature (De Resurr. Carnis, c. 12 :) Dies moritur in noctem, et tene- 
bris usquequaque sepelitur. Funestatur mundi honor ; omnis 
substantia denigratur. Sordent, silent, stupent cuncta : ubiquejus- 
titium est. Ita lux amissa lugetur : et tamen rursus cum suo cultu, 
cum dote, cum sole, eadem et integra et tota universo orbi revivis- 
cit ; interficiens mortem suam, noctem ; rescindens sepulturam suam 
tenebras ; heres sibimet existens, donee et nox reviviscat, cum sua 
et ilia suggestu. Redaccenduntur enim et stellarum radii, quos 
matutina succensio extinexerat : reducuntur et siderum absentia?, 
quos temporalis distinctio exemerat : redornantur et specula lunoe, 
quae menstruus numerus attriverat : revolvuntur hyemes et testa- 
tes, verna et autumna, cum suis viribus, moribus, fructibus. Quip- 
pe etiam terra? de ccelo disciplina est arbores vestire post spolia, 
flores denuo colorare, herbas rursus imponere, exhibere eadem qua? 
absumpta sunt semina ; nee prius exhibere, quam absumpta. Mira 
ratio ! de fraudatrice servatrix : ut reddat intercipit ; ut custodiat, 
perdit ; ut integret, vitiat ; ut etiam ampliat, prius decoquit... Nihil 
deperit, nisi ; n salutem. Totus igitur hie ordo revolubilis rernm, 
testatio est resurrectionis mortuorum. Operibus earn praescripsit 
Deus antequam Uteris ; viribus prsedicavit antequam vocibus. Prse- 
misit tibi naturam magistram, submissurus et prophetiam, quo fa- 
cilius credas prophetiae, discipulus naturoe ; quo statim admittas, 
cum audieris quod ubique jam videris, nee dubites Deum carnis 
etiam resuscitatorem, quern omniiim noris restitutorem. 



156 LECTURE IT. 

The spring time suggested such joyful solemnities, because 
it was felt to be in some sort the Easter of nature, and ob- 
scurely to give pledge, or at least intimation, of a higher 
Easter in store for man. 

And if it may be permitted me to take a little wider range, 
and to gather proofs and confirmations of what I am affirm- 
ing, of the manner in which human nature- has claimed a 
resurrection as its own, not from the heathen world on- 
ly, but wherever in popular faith or tradition I can find 
them, I would then adduce, as a remarkable illustration of 
this, the exceeding difficulty with which the world has ever 
persuaded itself of the death of any who have mightily blest 
it, or with whom it has confidently garnered up its dearest 
hopes — the eagerness with which it snatches at the thought, 
that such a one has not truly died, making much of the 
slightest hint that seems to give a colour to this hope ; so 
congenial is it to the heart of man. It was said of Moses, 
"No man knoweth his sepulchre unto this day/' (Deut. 
xxxiv. 6,) and these words, despite the plain declaration 
that went before, were sufficient provocation for a whole fam- 
ily of Jewish legends, to the effect that he had not really 
paid the debt appointed to every man living. In like man- 
ner we know how that word of the Lord concerning the be- 
loved apostle, " If I will that he tarry till I come, what is 
that to thee V this was enough to cause the report to go 
forth that he should not die ; and not the express denial by 
St. John himself of any such significance in the words, was 
able to extinguish this belief, which continued to propagate 
itself from age to age.* 

In like manner we sometimes see a whole nation which 
has found it impossible to believe that he on whom its 
hopes were fondly built, whom it had trusted should at length 

* See Augustine, In Ev. Joh., Tract. 124: Tertullian, De Animd, 
c. 50 ; Hilary, De Trinit. 1. 6, c. 39 ; Jerome, Adv. Jovin., 1. 1, c. 
26 ; Neander's Kirch. Gcsch., v. 5, p. 1117. 



THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 157 

have delivered it, and witb whose death those hopes have all 
fallen to the ground, — that he indeed has come, like other 
men, under the law of mortality, — has passed away, and left 
his work, as it seems, unconcluded. How long Britain was 
waiting for her Arthur J how long did the legends that told 
of him as surviving yet in the far valley of Avalon live on 
the lips and in the hearts of a people. And exactly in the 
same manner, in a later and more historic age, Portugal 
waited for her youthful king, looking fondly and with aching 
expectation for his return — and this, for many a weary year 
after he had perished, not obscurely, but in open fight, 
among the sands of Africa.* 

And may not some of us have known, brethren, in our 
own experience, something that quite explains to us this dif- 
ficulty of believing in death ? Have we not found this diffi- 
culty ourselves ? and how, when the loved are gone, when 
they have left their places empty, it is only by repeated ef- 
forts that we can realize to ourselves that it indeed is so — 
how we have to say again and again to hearts half incredu- 
lous still, that it will never again in this world be otherwise 
— that so much truth and faith' and love have indeed been 
withdrawn from hence and forever. Thus earnestly does 
the spirit of man protest even against that semblance of an- 
nihilation, which death seems to wear. 

* Thus Michelet (Hist, de France, 1. 17,) having told the death of 
the last Duke of Burgundy: "Iln'etait pas facile de persuader au 
peuple que celui dont on avait tant parle etait bien vraiment mort. 
II etait cache, disait on, il etait tenu enferme, il s'etait fait moine ; 
des pelerins l'avaient vu, en Allemagne, a Rome, a Jerusalem ; il 
devait reparaitre tot ou tard ; comme le roi Arthur ou Frederic Bar- 
berousse, on etait sur qu'il reviendrait. II se trouvait des mar- 
chands, qui vendraient a credit pour etre payes au double, alors que 
reviendrait ce grand due De Bourgogne." It is well known how 
many obscure rumours have in like manner found favour with the 
common people in different parts of Europe, that Napoleon is yet 
alive. * 

14 



158 LECTURE IT. 

Nor need it of necessity be the loved or hoped in, those 
in whom the expectations of others have been intensely cen- 
tered : let it be only some terrible man, one that has curdled 
the life-blood of the world with fear; and even such a one 
as this, having once been so much to men, though only so 
much to their fears, they will hardly be persuaded to have 
indeed passed away from the earth which so quaked and shud- 
dered at his tread. How long after the death of Nero did the 
firm persuasion survive, that he was only hidden for a sea- 
son and that the earth should once more be cursed with his 
presence — the Christians of the Roman Empire giving this 
expectation a coloring natural to them, and conceiving of 
him as the personal Antichrist, who should make presently 
his terrible re-appearance from the East, to carry forward 
against them the work of blood which he had commenced.* 

But to return to the sphere more directly marked out for 
me by my subject, and to look there for the evidences of the 
manner in which the spirit of man is incredulous of death, 
witnesses, protests against it, as by a second sight sees what 
shall be in the fulness of time, and prematurely grasps at it, 
— what frequent mention in the Greek fable we meet of visit- 
ers of Hades, of those that have descended and held inter- 
course with the spirits there, those who have in a sense 
" preached to the spirits in prison," and then returned from 
the kingdom of night — or it may be burst for others, as well 
as for themselves, the gates and barriers of the grave, rescu- 
ing and bringing back from that dark region to the glad 
light of life some delivered soul. I may spare any great 
details in proof of this; time would not allow them; such 
might scarcely seem in place ; and to a congregation like 
that which I address they would be evidently superfluous. 
By one example only I would indicate that which I mean, 
but that example the most illustrious which ancient fable 

* T<icitus, Hist, 1. 2, c. 8 ; Suetonius, Nero, c. 57 ; Augustine, De 
Civ. Dei, 1. 20, c. 19; Lactantius, De Mori. Pers., 2. 






THE VANQUISHER OF HADES. 159 

supplies. It is familiar to us all how the great cycle of the 
labours of Hercules was not finished till he had done battle 
with Death. Earthly exploits, even the mightiest and most 
marvellous of these were not sufficient. It was felt, and most 
truly, that to complete even the idea of the hero-champion 
of men, something more was needed, a greater victory was 
demanded at his hands : he must wrestle with, and in per- 
sonal conflict overcome, foes mightier than those of flesh and 
blood — even the last enemy, death and the grave. Nor even 
then had his own life attained its perfect consummation; 
since for this it was needed that all which was of earth in 
himself should be burned out, that the dregs of mortality 
should be cleansed away in the purifying flames of a funeral 
pyre, willingly ascended — and this being done, that he him- 
self, in sign that he could not die any more, that he was in- 
deed made partaker of immortality, that death could have 
no more dominion over him, should be wedded to eternal 
Youth amid the blissful mansions of the immortal gods.* 

Such no doubt, is the interpretation of this pregnant sym- 
bol ; and thus, brethren, by a thousand voices, in a thousand 
ways, the world has been declaring that it was not made for 
death, for that dread and alien thing, which, notwithstanding, 
it found in the midst of it. Thus has it looked round for 

* In Buttman's Myihologus, v. 1, p. 252 seq., the higher signifi- 
cance of the whole mythus of Herakles is unfolded with an exquisite 
tact and beauty. Without entering into the merits or demerits of 
other parts of the book, it may yet be as well to say that it is only 
this single treatise which I wish to speak of in this language of ad- 
miration. If K. Muller is right in his conjecture that Afyoy-z'oj- 
Add/jLaatos {H- 9, 158,) the indomitable, a name belonging to Hades, 
and that Apollo's service of Admetus is his passing down to the in- 
fernal world in consequence of having slain the earth-born Python ; 
if this be true, and he brings much that is curious in confirmation 
of this view, we may then add one more, and that not the least re- 
markable, to the Greek mythic narrations of this description. (See 
his Scientific Mythology, p. 243 — 246 Engl. Transl.) 



160 LECTURE II. 

one who should roll away the stone fronr the door of that 
sepulchre, to which it had seen its sons one after another 
unreturniDglj descend ; and eking out the weakness of its 
arguments for immortality by the strength of its desires, it 
has been forward to believe that for this one and that the 
stone had been actually rolled away. But yet presently again, 
it has felt only too surely that it had but the shadow, and not 
the very substance, of the things hoped for : and in doubt and 
perplexity, in despondency and fear, has made the words of 
the Psalmist its own : " Dost thou show wonders among the 
dead? Shall the dead rise up and praise thee?" but, unlike 
him, it has not known what answer to give to its own ques- 
tion. 

And so it went on, until at length, after many a false dawn, 
the world's Easter morning indeed broke, and from beside an 
empty tomb they went forth, the witnesses of Jesus, preach- 
ing Him and the resurrection ; men able to declare things 
which they had seen, — that there was indeed a risen Head 
of our race, one who had tasted death for every man, who, 
not in poet's dreams, or in legend of olden time, but in very 
- truth, had burst its bands, because it was impossible He 
should be holden by them ; that there was one for whom 
death was what men had so often, and so fondly and signifi- 
cantly called it — even a sleep ; for He had laid Him down 
and slept, and after his three days' rest in the grave, risen 
up again, because the Lord had sustained Him, The day 
at length arrived, when men were able v to go forth, preaching 
Him who had shown himself alive by many infallible proofs ; 
in whom too, being risen, mortality was swallowed up in life ; 
and who was now seated at the right hand of the Majesty 
on high, angels and principalities and powers being made 
subject unto Him. 

Such was the word of their message — that the stone was 
rolled away, that the riddle of death was solved ; and hearts 
unnumbered welcomed the tidings, and expander tntmselves 



THE VANQUISHER OF HADES 161 

to it, as flowers, shut through some long dreary night, unfold 
themselves to the warmth and the light of the returning day. 
And shall not we, brethren, bear our part in the great jubilee 
which that message of theirs has summoned the world to 
keep, in the glory and gladness of this day and of this day's 
mystery, before which all phantoms and shadows of the night 
flee away, before which all sadness and despair are weak to 
stand 1 Truly, with a deep insight into the mystery of this 
Easter morn, did the great poet of our modern world make 
the Easter hymn — the glad voices which said Christ is risen, 
these, caught by accident, of potency suflicient to wrest the 
poison-cup untasted from the han-d of the despairing one, 
who had already raised it to his lips.* 

And how, brethren, fares it with ourselves ? Is that word 
for us a scatterer of sadnesses, a quickener of joys ? Does it 
enable us to put off the sackloth of our spirits, and to gird our- 
selves with gladness ? Let us earnestly ask ourselves this ques- 
tion; for surely it is a sign that all is not right with us, when 
other things make us glad, but not this — when the natural 
spring fills our hearts with natural joy, but this with no spirit- 
ual — when we stand aloof, cold and unsympathiziug, as the 
wondrous cycle of the Christian year goes round, as the great 
events of our Lord's life and death and resurrection and 
glory succeed one another in a marvellous order; not hum- 
bling ourselves in the humiliations of that life, and therefore 
not exulting in its triumph ; never having stood beside the 
cross of Jesus, and therefore having no right and no desire 
to stand beside that open tomb, where he reared his first, his 
everlasting trophy over death. If we feel not this gladness, 
let us take shame to our dull hearts, and claim it as a gift 
from our God, which he will not deny us. Let us ask that 
we too may be borne upward and borne onward on the great 
stream of the Church's exultation. Let us ask this ear- 

* See Goethe's Faust, Scene 1. 



LECTURE II. 



Destly; let us ask it as something wh;< , h W(j h( . ^ 
without For of this let us be- sure, that now, after eighteen 
hundred years, that announcement of the angel, "He is not 
here, but risen," should be as fresh and new, as full of an un- 
utterable joy to us, as it was to those weeping women, who 
came to pay the last sad honours to their dead Lord, but 
found only his empty and forsaken grave. 






LECTURE III. 

THE SON OF GOD. 

Acts XIV. 11. 

And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, 
saying, in the speech of Lycaonia, The gods are come down to us in 
the likeness of men. 

It was my endeavour when we last met, to trace out the 
manner in which humanity has ever been looking in one 
quarter or another for its redeemers and saviours — for deliver- 
ers from physical, deliverers from moral evil. Carrying for- 
ward my subject a step, it will be now my aim to show how 
it has not merely been heroic men, men who triumphed over 
all, even death itself, but divine men, for whom the world 
has been craving; in whom it has felt deeply that its help 
must lie — a most true voice of man's spirit ever telling him 
that only from heaven the true deliverance of the earth could 
proceed. We shall see how men have been ever cherishing 
the conviction of a real fellowship between earth and heaven^ 
and that not merely an outward one, but an inward ) a con- 
viction that the two worlds truly met, not by external contact 
only, but in the deeps of personal life, in persons that most 
really belonged and held on to both worlds. We shall see 
how the world, with all its discords, has had also its preludes 
to the great harmonies of redemption ; has had its incarna- 
tions — sons of God, that have come down to live a human 
life, to undertake human toils, to die a human death : its 
ascensions — sons of men, that have been lifted up to heaven, 
and made partakers of divine attributes : we shall see how men 
have never conceived of this world around us as totally dis- 

(163) ' 



164 LECTURE III. 

severed from that world above us, with an impassible gulf 
between them, but always as in living intercommunion the 
one with the other. 

And to this subject the words of my text will form a fitting 
introduction, yielding, as they do, a signal testimony to a 
wide-spread faith through the heathen world in these living 
relations between heaven and earth; for no sooner did those 
men of L} T stra see in Paul and Barnabas, beneficent heal- 
ing presences, with power to chase away the sicknesses of 
men, than at once they leaped at the conclusion, "The gods 
are come down to us in the likeness of men," and could 
hardly be restrained from offering them divine honours. 
The words themselves are a noticeable evidence of the world's 
preparedness, even in that day, when so much of an earlier 
and more childlike faith had perished, to welcome its delive- 
rer from heaven. Nor are we without a parallel evidence to 
the same in that exclamation of the awe-struck heathen cen- 
turion, who, at sight of nature suffering with her suffering 
Lord and setting her seal to the awful meaning of his death, 
could come to no other than a like conclusion, and exclaimed, 
" Truly this was the Son of God." 

For indeed this, which is peculiar to our Christian faith, 
namely, that in it at length, and in it only, a real meeting- 
place between heaven and earth has been established in the 
person of Jesus of Nazareth — that the divine was born into 
the human, and so not by transient and external contact, but 
in very deed, heaven came down to earth, and the earth was 
lifted up into heaven, God became a man, and man God — 
this, which is the peculiar prerogative and glory of our Chris- 
tian faith, is yet not so peculiarly ours, but that every reli- 
gion has, in some shape or other, made pretensions to the 
same. It was claimed of all, though fulfilled only in one. 
" The tabernacle of God is with men, and he will be their 
God, and dwell among them" — this in positive fulfilment 
did only in the Only-begotten come true ; yet, as far as the 



THE SON OF GOD. 165 

idea reaches, is the essence and centre, not of one religion, 
but of all. Men may conceive it under different aspects, 
may imagine it to be brought about in various ways ; some 
of these ways will approach nearer to the heart of the mat- 
ter than others ; but this idea, in one shape or another, must 
constitute the central one of every religion. 

I will endeavour to trace a few proofs of this, as in the 
heathen religions of antiquity they meet us every where, — 
to hold up before you a few forms which, with more or less 
distinctness, men expressed their desire after, or embodied 
their belief in, this fellowship, — and more than fellowship, 
this union between God and man j and then to show how 
far short, even in idea, not to speak of the realization of 
that idea, all which men ever conceived of in this way fell 
of the actual fact upon which the Church is founded. 

And first, would we trace what is nearest to a nation's 
heart, we should turn to its poetry ; there we shall find not 
what it has, but what it is reaching after — not its actual 
work-day world, but that ideal world after which it is long- 
ing. If, then, we turn to the oldest, the epic, poetry of 
Greece, we behold heroes and gods and men mingling famil- 
iarly together. In this free intercourse, in this beaten and 
well-trodden way between earth and heaven, we have what 
we might venture to call the heathen counterpart to the heav- 
enly ladder seen by Jacob in dream, on which angels were 
ascending and descending, with the Lord himself at the sum- 
mit; even as that was but the weak intimation of a closer 
union between earth and heaven to be effected in the person 
of the Son of Man — a union wherein God should no longer 
appear at the summit of the ladder, but at its foot — no longer 
a God far off, but near ; — men now at last beholding the 
" heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descend- 
ing upon the Son of Man." 

We may select one instance more which Greek art will 
supply, of the sense of so intimate relations between God 



166 LECTURE III. 

and man, as only the Incarnation could at length adequately 
express. We oftentimes take it as a matter of course, one 
which therefore excites in us no reflection or surprise, that 
the statues of the Grecian gods should be in human forms, 
in the perfection of human grace and beauty, the highest which 
the skill of the artist could attain. And yet what a wonderful 
thing was this, — to have arrived at the conviction that the 
human was the most adequate expression for the divine — 
that if God did reveal himself, it would be as man — that the 
nearest approximation to the ideal of humanity was the wor- 
thiest type of the Godhead. These too in their kind we 
must regard as prophecies of the Incarnation ; not indeed, 
of the deeps of that mystery, but weak prophecies of it still. 
Not, however in the ideal world of art only did this faith 
find utterance, but in the actual world as well. The whole 
scheme of an Oriental court, and eminently that of the great 
King, was laid out on the idea that it was the visible rep- 
resentation of the court of heaven, and the king himself a 
visible incarnation of the highest God. The sense of this 
speaks out in every arrangement, in the least as in the great- 
est, and is the key to them all. Thus, the laws of that king- 
dom, when once uttered, could not be reversed or changed, 
(Dan. vi. 8,) because the king who gave them was the incar- 
nation of God, and God cannot repent, or alter the thing 
which has gone out from his lips.* 

* God is afpfrti'oj, his counsels a/jiston&rjT'a, and he not a man 
that he should repent ; and even such his visible representative on 
earth must be. It was on this unchangeableness of what had once 
gone forth from the lips of the king, which itself was thus no capri- 
cious state rule, but grew out of the very idea on which the Per- 
sian monarchy rested, that the enemies of Daniel founded their con- 
fident expectations of success in their conspiracy against him. (Dan. 
vi. 8, 15.) So, too, when then the purposes of Ahasuerus the king 
were altered concerning the Jews, he yet could not reverse the edict 
which permitted them to be attacked by their enemies : he could 
only give another edict, allowing them to stand upon their defence. 
(Esth. viii. 10, 11.) 



THE SON OF GOD. 1G7 

None, as again we learn from the book of Esther (iv. 11,) 
might come into the king's presence unbidden and live, save 
by a distinct act of grace. They must die, unless the golden 
sceptre, in token of this grace, was held out to them ; because 
none but the pardoned can behold the countenance of God, 
and not perish at its intolerable brightness. So, as that 
same book teaches us, it was forbidden to one clothed in 
sackcloth to enter within the palace ; (iv. 2 ;) and this, be- 
cause heaven, of which that palace was the image, is the re- 
gion of life and gladness, not of sorrow or of death ) which, 
therefore, as they might not enter there, so neither might 
these things, which are their visible signs and symbols, en- 
ter into the palace of the king. The seven princes that 
stood nearest to the throne and saw the king's face, (i. 14,) 
correspond to the seven highest angels that were supposed to 
stand before, and nearest to the throne of God. Nor was 
the adoration offered to the Persian king a mere act of ho- 
mage or sign of fealty, but was most truly, and in the high- 
est sense, a worshipping ; and exactly because felt as such, 
was so earnestly resisted, though from different motives, by . 
the Greek alike, and the Jew — by the Greek, as dishonouring 
to himself, by the Jew, as dishonouring to his God. It was 
a worshipping of the king's person for the presence of God, 
which was supposed to dwell singularly in him. 

Again, when the foremost place in all the earth had passed 
into the possession of another, what was the apotheosis of a 
Homan Caesar, in life or after death," but a troubled speaking 
out of men's sense, that he who stood in the forefront of hu- 
manity, the chiefest of the sons of men, should also be more 
than man ? This, in itself most true, did only become the 
fearful blasphemy it was, when the worship was misapplied, 
and the object to which it was due had been mistaken. It 
was indeed an irony of the heathen world, and of its magnifi- 
cent pretensions, worthy of the great author of mischief, 
when the honour that it owed to Christ the Lord, being diver- 






168 LECTURE III. 

ted on the way, was rendered to a Nero or a Tiberius. The 
prince of this world was herein mocking his votaries, exactly 
as he mocked the Jews, when they too were led to incor- 
porate their rejection of all that was best, and their choice 
of all which was worst, in an outward fact, in that cry of 
theirs — "Not this man, but Barabbas." 

And I may perhaps be permitted to observe as not alien 
to our present argument, but as another striking proof of 
this craving of men for that which is given them in Christ 
and in his incarnation, for such a bridal of two worlds as 
was celebrated therein, that whenever, even in Christendom, 
men have lost their faith in this gift, or have suffered that 
faith to grow weak, then they have not rested till they have 
created for themselves a substitute for that truth which thus 
they have let go. Thus, no sooner had men's faith in a 
present, though invisible, Head of his Church waxed feeble 
— no sooner did the God-man, because he could not be seen, 
or touched, or handled, appear far off to carnal and sense- 
bound generations, than they began to yearn for a substitute, 
who should give them in palpable form all which they no 
longer felt that they possessed in Him. And thus men be- 
gan to lend questionable honours and ambiguous titles to a 
pope ; and ever as they more let go their sense of the reality 
of Christ' s-headship, they lent more of his glories, of his names, 
his honours, his divine attributes, to the man who had placed 
himself in his seat, and offered them in a gross and visible 
way that connexion between earth and heaven, which they 
were intended to have found in him of whom it is written, 
" The Head of overy man is Christ." 

Exactly in the same manner, a thoughtful observer of the 
progress of Unitarianism in our own day, will not have failed 
to note that a system which shrinks from saying " Christ is 
God," yet finds it impossible to rest in that denial, and is 
rapidly and inevitably hastening to say, even as it has already 
said plainly enough by the lips of its most forward votaries, 



THE SON OF OOD. 169 

" Man is God," giving in the end, to every man, that which 
it started with affirming it was blasphemy to give to any, 
even to the Son himself. And were that, or any other yet 
barrener form of unbelief, to succeed for a time in emptying 
the throne in men's hearts wherein the Son of God is sitting, 
on the instant we should behold impious and frantic enthu- 
siasts springing up on every side, claiming the vacant seat, 
and obtaining, too, the homage which was withholden from 
Him. For truly our deliverance from superstition lies not 
in unbelief but in faith. In holding fast the truth, and only 
in that, are we delivered from its distorted counterfeit. 
Thus the holy Eucharist, satisfying, as it does, the solemn 
and mysterious cravings of the human soul, delivers the 
Christian world from hateful mysteries and dark orgies. 
Thus, again, faith in the sacrifice once offered upon Calvary 
hinders and cuts off those hideous attempts at expiation, 
which, but for that, the sin-laden heart of man would inevi- 
tably devise for itself. And thus, too an exalted Saviour 
preserves us from blasphemous usurpers of divine honours, 
the truth of God from the lie of the devil. 

But let us see, brethren, what nearer to the heart of the 
matter the old world had, of incarnations and. ascensions; let 
us see the highest form in which it presented these truths to 
itself. And, contemplating that highest, let us still take 
note how the Christian truth of the word made flesh, even 
as a doctrine, was original — not to say that alone in Christ 
it passed from a speculation, and became a fact. It will be 
instructive to mark how all other systems not merely did 
not give what they professed to give, (for that of course,) 
how even what they professed to give, fell short of, 
and was only an approximation to, the actual needs of 
humanity. 

Thus the Greek mind could conceive of a much suffering 
man lifted up for his toils' and virtues' sake into the highest 

15 



170 LECTURE ITT. 

heaven. Their pantheon is full of such, — of heroes after the 
toils and conflicts of a life worthily spent for their fellow-men, 
made free of heaven, and admitted even into the circle of 
the immortal gods ; and so far they had in their popular belief 
anticipations of Him, the man Christ Jesus, whom, because 
He humbled Himself, and for our sakes became obedient to 
the death of the cross, therefore God greatly exalted Him, 
setting him at his own right hand. 

But yet how little was there here any true blending of 
the human and divine, and how truly men felt this ; as is 
wonderfully testified by the fact that this exalted and glori- 
fied man, however many divine attributes were added to him, 
yet did not get the name of God ; he was but a 8aifxu>v after 
all j he was not, to use language which has been well used 
of the Son, Deus ex radice. They felt with a right instinct 
that a deified man did not thereby, and that indeed he could 
not, become God — that no accumulation of divine honours 
could make one truly God, who was not such already ; even 
as the church, in a later day, was not to be deceived into ac- 
cepting the Arian theory concerning the Son of God as an* 
adequate substitute for her own, by the utmost prodigality 
of divine names, and titles, and honours which were proposed 
to be lavished upon Him. She felt rightly that all these 
would not in the least fill up the chasm that divided, and 
must divide for ever, God from that which was not God. So 
was it with the apotheosis of heroic men : the divine glory 
did but gild and play upon the surface of their being ; if a 
man was to be also God, if there was to be any perfect union 
of the two, it must be by other means, by a process which 
must reach deeper and much farther back than this. 

But, moreover, the other half, the other factor, even of 
the idea of such a person as this, was altogether strange to 
the Greek mind. A God coming down from heaven, emp- 
tying himself of his glory, and in a noble suffering underta- 
king a human life, and, that he might be the helper and de- 



THE SON OF GOD. 171 

Jiverer of mm, enduring all, even the hardest, for them, 
tasting death itself, — all this, a God thus stooping, and suffer- 
ing, and dying, was wholly alien to every conception of 
theirs. The very idea of the gods with them was of beings 
free from all care, untouched by any sorrow, living ever joyful, 
and ever at ease : or, if they sojourned for awhile in this 
toilsome and tearful world, yet sojourning as visiters only — 
not touching the burden of its wo with the tip of their fin- 
ger — undertaking it might be human tasks, yet undertaking 
them in sport, not really coming under, or feeling their 
weight. True, indeed, that this conception of a suffering 
God, which was so strange to all western habits of thought, 
was familiar to the mythologies of the East. They have 
their Osiris, — and not him alone, though in him these suf- 
ferings of a divine nature come the most prominently and glo- 
riously out — who, in the fulness of his beneficent purposes for 
the race of men, and in mighty and earnest conflict with the 
prince of evil, endures all things, going down even to the 
deeps of death : and thus, no doubt, the Eastern religions 
were not without their anticipations of Him, who, though he 
was rich, yet made Himself poor, even the poorest, for us, 
that we through his poverty might be rich. 

And yet how imperfect, even as regards the idea, was this 
too. Humanity, however it craved a God for its deliverer, 
yet craved just as earnestly a man ; it wanted a redeemer 
out of its own bosom, one in whose every triumph over moral 
or physical evil it could rejoice that "God had given such 
power unto men." It felt, and truly, that no other would 
serve its turn- — that, forasmuch as the children are parta- 
kers of flesh and blood, he also, if he would be every man's 
brother, and thus able to be every man's redeemer, must be 
partaker of the same; "fairer than the children of men/' 
and yet himself a child of man — that from the midst of itself, 
from the depths of its own life, its redeemer must proceed. 
A God who was only God, might conquer for himself, but 



172 LECTURE III. 

there was no pledge or proof in his conquest, that man could 
eonquer; a God who overcame death and rose from the dead, 
gave no assurance thereby of a resurrection for the race of man. 

And thus each of the great divisions of the Gentile world 
had but a fragment, even in thought and desire, of the truth ; 
the Greek world, the exaltation of manhood — the Oriental, 
the glorious humiliations of Godhead ; and thus it came to 
pass that each of these, even as a speculation, was maimed 
and imperfect. These systems, so far from providing what 
man needed, had not satisfactorily and on every side even 
contemplated what he needed ; much less had they given it. 

And how indeed could it be given ? This was the riddle 
which He alone whose counsels were from everlasting, who 
knew all the true needs of man, and meant to satisfy them 
all, could solve. It seemed indeed that the world, craving 
one who should be man no less than God for its deliverer, 
put its demands in irreconcilable contradiction with them- 
selves ; and, again, that demanding for its redeemer one in 
whom the human and divine should not slightly and tran- 
siently touch one another, but should be brought into inner- 
most union, it here too required that which it was impossible 
that it ever should receive. And yet the same wonder-stroke 
of God solved both these problems. 

The first difficulty was this, if the world needed a man, 
yet where should it find the man that.it needed? It had 
often put forth its champions, but there was ever found an 
attainder of blood in every man's descent, a blot on every 
man's escutcheon, a flaw in every man's armour. If no help- 
er of humanity but one born out of its bosom would do, and 
yet every one born from thence partook in its sin, was one 
needing to be healed, and who could not therefore be him- 
self the healer, was a sharer in the diseased organism, and 
could not therefore expel its poison from others, whence was 
such a one to come ? The answer was at length given in 
the Virgin-born. Men had long before had an obscure ap- 



THE SON OF GOD. 173 

prehension that only so could the mystery be solved. The 
birth from a pure virgin had been attributed to many.* For 
there was that in men's hearts which told them that for one 
to be an effectual Saviour he must be a new beginning, a 
new head of the race ; not a mere link in the chain of sinful 
humanity, since of the sinful the sinless could never come; 
but by such marvellous means as that miraculous conception 
he must be exempted from the corruption transmitted from 
generation to generation of the children of men. 

But this was not all j this Virgin-born was also Imman- 
uel, was that which men had asked for, " God with us." He 
had, indeed, a Father, but that Father was God ; and thus 
in the deepest deep, in the innermost core and centre of 
his life, this man was also God. In the cradle of Bethle- 
hem, when a pure Virgin had been touched with fire from 
heaven, and had borne a Son, in Him, at length, the world 
found all its longings fulfilled, its seemingly irreconcilable 
desires all satisfied and atoned. 

Thus, brethren, I have sought to trace out before you, to- 
day, that which was perhaps the worthiest element in the 
religions of the heathen world — that which, indeed, entitled 
them to the character of religions at all — their recognition, 
with all shortcomings and deficiencies, of a real bond be- 
tween earth and heaven, their sense that the divine could 
reveal itself in no way so fitly as in the forms of the human, 
that the human could be lifted up to, and made to bear 
the weight of, the Divine — that man was God's offspring, 
of the blood royal of creation. The pervading sense of this 
was indeed what mainly constituted them, in God's provi- 
dence, preparations and predispositions for the absolute 
truth which should in fulness of time be revealed. For that 
there were upon these points certain predispositions for the 
reception of the truth in heathendom, which did not exist 
among the Jews, no one, I think, can deny. None can 

* Especially to founders of religions, as Buddha, Zoroaster. 
15* 



174 LECTURE III. 

thoughtfully read the early history of the church, and mark 
how hard the Jewish Christians found it to make their own 
the true idea of the Son of God, as indeed is witnessed by 
the whole epistle to the Hebrews — how comparatively easy 
the Gentile converts; how the Hebrew Christians were con- 
tinually in danger of sinking back into Ebionite heresies, 
making Christ but a man as other men, refusing to go on 
unto perfection, or to realize the truth of his higher nature ; 
— no one can mark this, and contrast it with the genial 
promptness of the Gentile church to embrace the offered 
truth, " God manifest in the flesh," without feeling that there 
must have been effectual preparations in the latter which 
wrought its greater readiness for receiving and heartily em- 
bracing this truth when it arrived. And what other prepa- 
rations could they have been, but these which we have been 
tracing ?* 

It is true that there was with this, infinitely too feeble a 
sense, too feeble even in the best, of the manner in which 
sin had cast them down from the high places of their birth 
— a confession far too weak and wavering, (for only the Holy 
Ghost could have wrought a right confession,) of that attain- 
der that was in their blood, the utter forfeiture of their in- 
heritance which their sin had brought about. It was not 
seen how man had ceased to be a son of God, could never, 
but by a new adoption, a regeneration, become such again. 
But man's divine original, his first creation in the image of 
God, was so firmly held fast to by all nobler spirits, that St. 
Paul, upon the hill of Mars, could at once take his stand 

* The Christian apologists often find help here. Thus Arnobius, 
(Adv. Gen., 1. 1, c. 37:) Natum hominem colimus. Quid enim, vos 
hominem nullum colitis natum ? Non unum et alium, non innume- 
ros alios, quinimmo non omnes quos jam templis habetis vestris, 
mortalium. sustulistis ex numero, et coelo sideribusque donastis ? 
He could appeal to such passages as that of Cicero, (Tusc. Qucest., 1. 
1,0. 13 '•) Totum prope coelum nonne humano genere completum 
est? 



THE SON OF GOD. 175 

on this as a great meeting point between himself and his 
Athenian hearers — as the ground which was common to them 
and him : "Certain also of your own poets have said, For we 
are also his offspring." (Acts xvii. 28.) Here at least, 
they were at one. 

And brethren, it is possible that we may learn a lesson 
which we need, or at least remind ourselves of truths which 
we are in danger of suffering to fall too far back in our 
minds, by the contemplation of those, who, amid all their 
errors and darkness and confusion and evil, had yet a sense 
so deeply imprinted, a faith so lively, that man was from 
God, as well as to God ; capable of the divine, only because 
himself of a divine race. Oftentimes it would seem as if our 
theology of the present day had almost lost sight of this, or 
at least held it with only too feeble a grasp ; beginning, as 
it so often does, from the fall, from the corruption of human 
nature, instead of beginning a step higher up — beginning 
with man a liar, when it ought to have begun with man the 
true image and the glory of God. 

And then, as a consequence, the dignity of Christ's Incar- 
nation, of his taking of humanity, is only imperfectly appre- 
hended. That is considered in the main as a make-shift for 
bringing God in contact with man ; and not to have been 
grounded on the perfect fitness of man, as the image of 
God, of man's organs, his affections, his life, to be the 
utterers and exponents of all the life, yea, of all the heart of 
God. It is oftentimes considered the chief purpose of Christ's 
Incarnation, that it made his death possible, that it provided 
him a body in which to do that which merely as God he could 
not do, namely to suffer and to die \ while some of the pro- 
foundest teachers of the past, so far from contemplating the 
Incarnation in this light, have rather affirmed that the Son of 
God would equally have taken man's nature, though of course 
under very different conditions, even if he had not fallen — 
that it lay in the everlasting purposes of God, quite irre- 



176 LECTURE III. 

spective of the fall, that the stem and stalk of humanity 
should at length bear its perfect flower in Him, who should 
thus at once be its root and its crown. But the Incarnation 
being thus slighted, it follows of necessity, that man as man 
is thought meanly of, though indeed it is only man as fallen 
man, as separated by a wilful act of his own from God, to 
whom this shame and dishonour belong. In his first per- 
fection, in the truth of his nature, he is the glory of God, 
the image of his Son, as the Son is the image of the Father, 
declaring the Son as the Son declared the Father : — surely 
a thought, brethren, which if we duly lay to heart, will 
make us strive that our lives may be holy, that our lives 
may be noble, worthy of Him who made us after his image, 
and when we had marred that and defaced it, renewed us 
after the same in his Son. 



LECTURE IV. 

THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 

MlCAH VI. (5, 7. 

Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high 
God? shall I come before him with burnt-offerings, with calves of a 
year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with 
ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my first-born for my trans- 
gression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ? 

There are few facts more mysterious, brethren, than the 
prevalence of the rite of sacrifice through the world. Na- 
tions which it is impossible could have learned it of one 
another, nations the most diverse in culture, the highest in 
the scale, and well nigh the lowest, differing in every thing 
besides, have yet agreed in this one thing, namely, in the 
offering of things which have life to God, — or when the idea 
of the one God has been lost, — to the gods many, of heathen- 
ism — the essential of that offering in every case being that 
the life of the victim was rendered up. And they have all 
agreed in considering that this act of theirs had a value, 
that it did place upon a new and better footing the relations 
in which they stood to the heavenly powers ; that by these 
sacrifices they might more or less re-constitute the relations 
between themselves and God, which by any cause had been 
disturbed, bringing themselves nigher to Him, and render- 
ing Him more favourable to them. 

Now there are few or none in our day who would count 
that they had explained the prevalence of these convictions, 
in the conspiracy of the more artful few to hold the simpler 
many in bondage. These convictions were too wide-spread, 

(177) 



1/0 LECTURE IV. 

too universal; moreover, men were too direfully earnest in 
carrying them out, to allow us to accept any such explanation 
as this. Sacraments they might be, and often were, of the 
devil, and not of God, but yet dreadful sacraments still — 
bonds and bands by which men knit themselves to one 
another, and knit themselves also to a spiritual world, — if 
not to heaven, yet to hell. Those who explain them into 
artful contrivances, may so give witness for their own shal- 
low insight into the past history of the world, for the absence 
of any deeper needs at work in their own hearts, since if 
there had been such, they would have suggested a profounder 
explanation : but the time is past when they will find any 
number of persons to accept their explanation as sufficient. 

As little can their theory be historically justified, who 
trace up the existence of sacrifice to the rude notions about 
God which belonged to an early age ; for then we should see 
a people, as it attained worthier views about Him, gradually 
outliving and renouncing the practice of this rite. But, 
contrary to this, we find in the most cultivated nations the 
theory of sacrifice only the more elaborately worked out, the 
sacrifices themselves only multiplied the more. Here and 
there there might be found in some obscure corner of the 
earth, a savage tribe or horde, which had sunk below the idea 
and practice of sacrifice ; though one in which, in one form 
or another, it did not survive, it would be difficult to point 
out; but nowhere a people that had risen above it. Here 
and there a philosopher may have set himself against the 
popular belief, but nowhere has he been able to change it; 
he has ever stood single and alone, and has as little carried 
with him the more thoughtful and deeper spirits of his time 
as the common multitude. He may have eloquently de- 
claimed on the absurdity of supposing the gods would be 
pleased with the death-struggles of animals, with the blood 
of bulls and of goats ; but there was ever something in men, 
though they might not be able to explain it to themselves, 



THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 179 

which told them that sacrifice had a significance and a mean- 
ing, which a few plausible words could not get rid of or 
destroy. 

Such, brethren, I think you will admit are the facts, for I 
speak to those capable of judging. Whether we turn to 
those pages of Greek and Roman literature, brought by our 
studies in this place especially before us, or whether we take 
a wider range within our ken, every where alike we encounter 
a consciousness upon man's part, that the relations between 
him and the powers in whose hand he is, have been inter- 
rupted and disturbed. The fact might be sometimes over- 
looked and forgotten by him in times of prosperity, but we 
see it evermore mightily emerging from the deep of his heart, 
when the judgments of offended heaven were evidently abroad. 
Every where, too, we encounter the effort by certain specific 
and definite acts of expiation and atonement to restore those 
disturbed relations again. " Without blood is no remission 
of sin," was a truth as deeply graven on the heart and con- 
science of heathen as of Jew. 

For vast and complex as is the Jewish system of offering, 
yet it is not a greater body of sacrifice than we meet almost 
everywhere else, when we turn to the ritual of heathenism. 
That Levitical system is of course in every way more com- 
plete : it is an organic whole; excluding all individual ca- 
price, all too into which the true idea of sacrifice, when es- 
caping from God's control, would inevitably degenerate. 
Moreover it was no will-worship, but the appointed way in 
which God was to be sought, and not that in which men out 
of their own hearts imagined that they would seek Him. 
But with all this, it does not, I think, run into greater de- 
tail, nor take more entire possession of the whole life of 
man, nor demand a more continual recognition of a distance 
and separation from God which has need to be removed, 
than did the heathen systems of sacrifice with which it was 
surrounded, when we take them in their sum total ; when we 



180 LECTURE IV. 

count up all their infinite forms and varieties. For doubt- 
less it was meant that they too, by this their multitude and 
repetition, should give testimony against themselves, should 
witness as plainly as did the Jewish in the same way, for 
their own weakness and unprofitableness ; since of them, too, 
we may say, that had they been effectual to do what they 
professed to do, " would they not have ceased to be offered, 
because the worshippers once purged would have had no 
more conscience of sin ?" But thus, by their endless multi- 
plication, and by the confession of weakness contained there- 
in, they pointed, though not with prophetic explicitness, yet 
still in their degree, away from themselves, and to that one 
all-sufficient sacrifice once offered upon Calvary. 

Nor need we, when we look a little deeper into the mat- 
ter, when we come to comprehend what was the central idea 
of sacrifice, be so much surprised, as at first we are, to find 
it this rite of an almost universal character. For then we 
perceive that it was no arbitrary invention, for which a thou- 
sand others might have been substituted as well ; but rather 
that the essence of all religion lies in that of which sacrifice 
was the symbol — namely, in the offering up of self, in the 
rendering up of our will to the will of Grod, the yielding of 
our life to him as something which had been rebellious 
in time past, and therefore worthy to die, but of which 
we desire that the rebellion may cease, that so we may of his 
mercy receive it back a life pardoned and forgiven. The 
blood is the seat of the life, the seat therefore of the smevfita, 
the desire, which in fallen man is a desire at variance with 
the will of God. In sacrifice, in the pouring out of the blood, 
is the symbolic rendering up of this rebellious principle ; a 
confession that it is only worthy to die : that as the thing 
offered died, so the offerer might justly die — the act having 
of course only its true significance when the offerer did real- 
ize to himself what he did — rested not in the outward work, 
but said to himself and to God, " I stand in living commu- 



THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 181 

nion with this which I offer ; even as this blood, so I offer 
myself; dying that I may live ; giving myself to Thee, that 
I may receive my true life back again at thy hands; losing 
my life that I may find it." Of course, it is not to be sup- 
posed that each worshipper so distinctly gave to himself an 
account of what he was doing ; but this lay more or less ob- 
scurely in the background of his mind, and gave a meaning 
to his act. Our ordinary use of the word sacrifice, shows 
how truly we have gotten to the innermost heart of its mean- 
ing; for it is ever used to signify the giving up of some- 
thing dear. And what so dear as our self-will ? The giv- 
ing up of that is indeed the giving up of all. 

But when we speak of the idea of sacrifice as being this 
giving up of the self-will, there may seem a difficulty in ap- 
plying this, when we come to the great and only perfect sac- 
rifice offered by Christ on the cross. Of course it was not 
there — no one would dare to suppose it was — the offering up 
of a rebellious will ; we hardly dare speak of such a thing, 
though it be but to deny it. But it was the giving up of 
his own will* — that will which had the liberty of choosing 
for itself what the Father had not chosen for it, but in the 
entire rendering up of which he realized the very central 
idea of all sacrifice, which all that had gone before had only 
pointed at weakly : " Sacrifice and burnt offering Thou 
wouldst not ; then said I, Lo ! I come to do thy will, 
God/' In other words, sacrifice and burnt-offering God was 
weary of — those shadows of the true; and Christ came to 
give the substance ; and his actual pouring out of his soul to 
death was the outer embodiment of the inward truth, that, 
this yielding of his will to his Father's reached to the utter- 



* And therefore the controversy of the Church with the Monoth- 
elites in the seventh century, a conflict in which commonly so little 
interest is taken even by students of Church History, was one 
for life and death. The denial of a human will in Christ was in fact 
a denial of his sacrifice. 






182 LECTURE IV. 



most, did not shrink from, or stop short of, the last and most 
searching proof to which it was put. 

In sacrifice, then, was the confession of a life forfeited, and 
this confession incorporating itself in an act, wherein the for- 
feiture was actually carried out. This, however, is but half 
the idea of sacrifice ; for it is ever this confession made in 
another. If a man had given himself to death, because he 
felt that he was worthy to die, he would but have involved 
his already confused relations to God in deeper confusion. 
He might be unworthy to live, but was not, therefore, at his 
own choice to die. If, as a sinner, he owed God a death, 
yet as God's creature, made to serve Him, he equally owed 
Him a life. The premises are right that man's life is for- 
feited ; but the conclusion fearfully wrong, when he carries 
out himself, and in his own person, the forfeiture. Such 
false conclusions from right premises they draw, the misera- 
ble victims that in our day fling their bodies to be crushed 
benenth the wheels of some idol car — the same they have 
drawn, who, in despair at the greatness of their sins, have 
lifted up their hands against their own life ; for even self- 
murder, that most hideous perversion of the idea of sacrifice, 
yet grounds itself on a sense of life being the only worthy 
offering. Thus a Judas goes and hangs himself, because he 
feels his sin so great that it cannot be left without an atone- 
ment, and in the darkness and unbelief of his heart he has 
put back the one atonement which would have been sufficient 
even for a sin so great as his ; and this, too, is the thought 
of each other, who, by a like fearful act of self-violence, has 
denied the love, though he cannot deny the righteousness of 
God. 

N.ever, then, in himself — never, by means of his own life, 
could man's acknowledgment that that life was forfeited 
rightly be carried out. It must needs be in another. And 
the same reason exists against making that other some fel- 
low-man. His life, too, is a sacred thing — is itself an end. 



THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 183 

It could not, therefore, be used as this means to some other 
end. In human sacrifices, in the offering of other men's 
lives, there appear the same false consequences from right 
grounds as in men offering of their own. It remained that, 
if sacrifice was to be, the sphere of animal life must be that 
of which it should take possession, and in which it must 
move ] the life of animals being the nearest akin to, and the 
noblest after man, and therefore fitter than any meaner for 
the setting forth his oblation of himself. And man thus 
taking possession of this, either at God's express command, 
or moved by his own religious instincts, was indeed taking 
possession of that over which he had entire right — of that, 
which having been given him for the use of the body, was 
much more given him for the spiritual needs of his soul. 

Such, I think, we may venture to say was the normal un- 
folding of the idea of sacrifice; the abnormal appears in 
those revolting caricatures of the true idea, on which we 
have lightly touched — in human sacrifices — in dreadful self- 
oblations — in Baal priests' cutting themselves with knives, 
and so pouring out, if not all, yet a part of their life — in the 
self-inflicted tortures and living death of Indian Fakirs — in 
the blind despair of mighty sinners, who, with profane hand, 
have broken in upon, and laid waste the awful temple of 
their own lives. 

Wonderful indeed, brethren, is the manner in which, 
armed with the truth, we may look upon past pages of the 
religious history of man — some of the most soiled and blot- 
ted — and decypher there an original writing of God, which 
all those stains and blots have not been able to render illegi- 
ble altogether.* If we have only a ear to hear, marvelous 
voices will reach us, and from quarters most unexpected, 
which shall speak to us of Calvary and of the Cross, though 

* Tertullian (Dc Anima, c. 41) ; Quod enim a Deo est non tarn 
extinguitur quam obumbratur. Potest enim obumbrari, quia non 
est Deus ; extingui non potest, quia a. Deo est. 



184 LECTURE IV. 

hough they little mean it themselves : such voices, for in- 
stance, as his, who accounting for the human sacrifices of 
the G-auls observed, that they were deeply persuaded that 
only the life of man was a fit redemption for man.* What 
was this conviction of theirs but the dark side of that truth 
which the apostle to the Hebrews proclaimed, when he said 
that the blood of bulls and of goats could not take away 
sin, but that it must be purged away by better sacrifices than 
these.")" Nor do I think it will otherwise than repay us well 
to follow a little into detail the convictions of the world con- 
cerning that which constituted a sacrifice of worth, and trace 
how everything here pointed — whether it meant it, or not; 
yea, when it seemed most to point away from him — to the 
central figure in the world's spiritual history, to the immacu- 
late Lamb, which taketh away the sins of the world. 

* Caesar (De B. G., i. 6, c, 16): Pro vita hominis nisi hominis 
vita reddatur non posse aliter deorum immortalium numen placari 
arbitrantur. Cf. Muller's Darians, b. ii., c. 8, \ 2. Out of a sense 
of this arose the extreme difficulty of eradicating human sacrifices 
in the Roman empire, and the long survival of some of them. Thus 
Tertullian [Apol. 9) : Infantes penes Africam Saturno immolabantur 
palam usque ad proconsulatum Tiberii. Cf. Scrop., c. 7; Minucius 
Felix, p. 199, Ouzel's edit.; Pliny, H. N., 1. 30, c. 3, 4; Eusebius, 
Prcep. Evang., 1. 4, c. 17. 

f Thus there was an obscured truth in those abject and crouching 
superstitions, which Plutarch paints with such a masterly hand in 
his exquisite little treatise, Ilspt AstcaSai^owaj — a truth which he 
misses ; a recognition, that is, of sin, of a great gulf fixed between 
the sinner and the offended power of heaven, which the Ssiaidai/jicov, 
however vainly, was seeking to bridge over. His terror and his 
trouble had a true ground, and one which would hinder him from 
accepting as sufficient such attempts to pacify his fears as those 
which Plutarch offers him — namely, that the gods were kind 
(/u,s(,%l%i,oi). There was something else besides this which he was 
craving to know, before he could dare to believe that they were 
other than enemies to him. 



THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 185 

Thus it is hardly needful to observe, that it lay ever iu 
the deepest convictions of men that an offering to be accep- 
table, must be an offering of value, not something which 
cost the bringer nothing — that, while all was poor by com- 
parison with Him to whom it was offered, or considered in 
relation to that for which it was offered, yet must it be the 
best which the offerer had — not the lame and the blind, not 
the scanty gifts of a niggard hand — he thus giving token, 
that if he had aught worthier he would bring it. Therefore 
must the selected victim be pure of fault and of blemish, or, 
having such, was unfit for the altar — the sense of this re- 
quired perfection being as lively in heathen sacrifice as in 
Jewish. Therefore was the bullock brought which had 
never yet submitted its neck to the yoke, the horse which 
had known no rider, or, in Hindoo ritual, no touch even of 
man ; in other words, that was brought which had not been 
already used and in part worn out in the service of the world, 
but which was thus wholly and from the first consecrated to 
heaven. Hence, too, as the offering must not be a niggard 
one, the prodigality in sacrifice which startles us at times : 
the hecatombs of victims, the rivers of oil, the cattle from a 
thousand hills. 

Herein, too, lay the explanation of yet direr sacrifice — 
as of their sons and daughters in the Moloch-worship of the 
Phoenicians — the fruit of their body for the sin of their soul ; 
— such offering, for instance, as we read of at Carthage, when, 
instead of the cheaper substitutes with which they had satis- 
fied themselves for long, they sought out, in the mighty peril 
of the city the dearest things which they had, the choicest 
children of the noblest houses, and cast them into the glow- 
ing arms of that merciless idol, which their sin-darkened 
hearts had devised for their god.* Out of this same sense 
that an offering grew in worth with the worth of that which 

* Diodorus Siculus, 1. xx., c. 14. Cf. 2 Kin. iii., 27; Eusebius, 
Prcep. Evang., 1. iv., c. 16. 

14* 



186 LECTURE IV. 

was offered, sprang the rejoicing among the worshippers of 
Odin, when the lot of the yearly sacrifice fell upon no meaner 
man than the king — the pledge of a future felicity to the 
nation which was esteemed herein to lie.* To what did all this 
reaching out after the worthiest, the purest, the choicest, the 
"best, point, even in its dreadfulest perversions, but to Him 
who was the fairest of the children of men, the choicest which 
the earth had born, the one among ten thousand, who yet, 
being such, did by the eternal Spirit offer Himself without 
spot to God — who being the anointed king of the world was 
thus in a condition to make acceptable atonement for all 
men? 

Nor less significant was the sense of a more prevailing 
atonement, of an added value which was imparted to an offer- 
ing, when one, not thrust on by necessity, not compelled to 
die, but willingly, offered himself; the feeling of which was 
so strong, that if not the reality, yet at least the appearance 
of this willingness, was often by singular devices sought to 
be obtained. f When, for example, the foremost man of a 
nation gathered upon his sole devoted head all the curses 
which impended on his people, all the anger of the immortal 
powers,J and with that upon him gave himself to a willing 

* Witsius (De Theol. Gent, p. 633,): De Septentrionalibus populis 
refert Dithmarus primo anni mense nonaginta novem sortito eligi 
solitos qui diis immolarentur, idque durasse usque ad Henrici L, 
Germanise regis, tempora. Faustissimum veto id regno litamen 
existimatum, si sors regem tetigisset; quam victimam totius populi 
multitudo sunima cum gratulatione et applausu prosecuta sit. 

j- Thus Tertullian, of the parents that offered their children to 
the Phoenician Moloch: (Apol. 9:) Libentes respondebant, et infan- 
tibus blandiebantur, ne lacrimantes immolarentur. Cf. Plutarch, 
Ilapt A£i6i8cu[A.ovLas, c. 13. 

J Thus Livy, of Decius: (Hist., 1. 9:) Omnes minas periculaque 
ab Deis superis inferisque in se unum vertit. On this whole subject 
of men as tyap/xaxoi, xaOap/.iata } Ttfpc^^uai'a, artot pdrtatot, see 
Lomeier, De Lustrat. Vet. Gent., c. 22. 



THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 187 

death for all, so turning, it might be, into victory the tide of 
disastrous battle, what have we here but in its kind a reach- 
ing out after Him, the chief and champion of the race of men, 
whose life no man took from him, for He might have asked 
of his Father more than twelve legions of angels against his 
enemies — but who sanctified Himself, freely pouring out his 
soul unto death — and who, not that He might deliver some 
single people, but all the world, became the piacular expiation 
of that world, drew upon his own head the penalties which 
would else have alighted upon all, became a curse for man ; 
and, when all was at the worst, when all seemed for ever lost, 
changed by his accepted death the certain defeat into the 
glorious victory of our race ? 

We may not refuse, brethren, to recognise these references 
to the cross of Christ : we shall read the history and mytho- 
logy of the old world with little profit if we do. Nor need 
we fear the recognition ; for it is the marvelous, and at the 
same time most natural prerogative of Christianity, that, be- 
ing the absolute truth, it has, or rather itself is, the touch- 
stone to discover all true and all false, detects the truth which 
is hidden in every lie, finds witness for itself in that which 
oftentimes seems, and indeed is, most opposed to itself, is 
able to recognise in the tares of earth the degenerate wheat 
of heaven — in the world's harshest discords, the wreck and 
ruin of God's fairest harmonies — and, in Satan himself, the 
lineaments of the fallen angel of God. 

But besides the witness for the great coming sacrifice, 
which was contained in the sacrifices of heathenism, how 
mighty a sense Of the cross of Christ, and of its significance, 
do we meet in other regions of ancient life. What a boding 
of it, for instance, forms the background of the Greek 
tragedy. How mysterious is the manner there in which, from 
some far back transgression, some rtpwr'ap^oj a**?,* the curse 

* iEschylus, Agamemnon, 1163. 



188 LECTURE IV. 

clings to a family, passes on from generation to generation, 
an ever-increasing load of transgression ; until at length the 
great calamity, the headed-up guilt of all, lights not on the 
most, but on the least guilty head, on the head of one that 
by comparison is innocent. What an unconscious symbol, 
this, of the curse cleaving to the Adamic race ! For as in 
each lesser circle of that race we most often see the burden 
of the cross resting with the heaviest weight on the truest 
heart in that circle, so in the great circle of humanity we be- 
hold Him of the truest heart of all, the only unguilty One, 
bearing on the accursed tree the accumulated curse of the 
whole Adamic family, which had come down through long 
ages ; and not bearing only, but bearing it away. For as in 
those solemn and stately works of ancient art to which I 
alluded, mild breaths of reconciliation seem to make them- 
selves felt, when once the curse has alighted, the expiation 
has been made — not otherwise, and only far more gloriously, 
does the deep inner connexion between the judgment of the 
world and the forgiveness of the world appear in that death 
of Christ, which was at once judgment and forgiveness in 
which the world was condemned, and in which, being con- 
demned, the world was also forgiven. 

But another evidence of the sacrifice of Christ, as that to 
which the world had been tending, lay in the endeavor of 
those who, after that sacrifice had been finished, would not 
accept it, to substitute something else of the same kind in 
its room. They felt that only so could they stand their 
ground, could they recover or maintain any hold upon the 
hearts of men. With what monstrous exaggerations the idea 
and practice of sacrifice re-appeared in the final struggle of 
Paganism with the Christian faith, is abundantly known to 
every student of Church history. The apostate Julian, for 
instance, of whose life the revival of Paganism was the ruling 
passion, ran here into extremes which earned him the ridicule 
of the more lukewarm adherents of the old superstition them- 



THE PERFECT SACRIEICE. 189 

selves ;* and he, the same who had trod under foot the cross 
of Christ, and counted the blood with which he was sanctified 
a common thing, did yet submit himself to loathsome rites,f 
seeking in the blood of bulls profusely poured on him, as in 
a cleansing bath, that purifying which he had refused to 
find in the precious blood-sprinkling of the Lamb of God, 
slain from the foundation of the world. 

Again, the inner neccesity of having somewhere a sacrifice 
to rest on, the certainty that if men have not the true, they 
will generate a substitute in its room, was signally proved 
by the manner in which the doctrine concerning the mass 
grew up in the Christian Church itself. No sooner did men's 
faith in a finished sacrifice, one lying at the ground of every 
prayer, every act of self-oblation, every acceptable work, grow 
weak, than the feeling that they must have a sacrifice some- 
where, produced, or, so to speak, by instinct developed, a doc- 
trine to answer their needs — turning that Holy Eucharist, 
which is the ever-present witness in the Church of a sacrifice 
once completed on the cross, and continually pleaded in hea- 
ven — turning that itself into the sacrifice, and seeking to 
supply by these poor but continual repetitions, the weakness 
of their faith in the one priceless offering, upon the accep- 
tance of which, as upon an unchangeable basis, the Church 
everlastingly reposes. 

And now, brethren, by way of practical conclusion from 
all this on which we have been entering to-day — what a wit- 
ness is there here against that shallow view of the truth 
which should bless us, that would leave it a bare doctrine, a 
system of morals, lopping away as superfluous and mystical, 

* See the manner in which the heathen Ammianus Marcellinus 
(1. xxiii., c. 12) speaks of the prodigality of his sacrifices. Victim- 
arins was the title given him at Antioch, not apparently by the Chris- 
tians alone. 

-j- Those of the tauroboliad. Prudentius (Peristeph. x., 1006 — 1050,) 
gives a description at large of this revolting rite. 



190 LECTURE IV. 

as a remnant of Judaism, all which speaks of atonement, of 
propitiation, of blood-sprinkling, of sacrifice. The contem- 
plation of the benefits of Christ's death under aspects sug- 
gested by these words, so far from being this shred of Juda- 
ism, which a more perfect knowledge must strip off, finds on 
the contrary as many anticipations everywhere besides as 
there. They are as busy about sacrifice in the outer court 
of the Gentiles as in the holier place of the Jews ; and as 
little there as here is it a separable accident, the garniture 
and fringe of something else, but in either case itself consti- 
tuting the core and middle point of worship, recognised in a 
thousand ways as that which must lie at the ground of all 
approaches unto God. 

And these things being so, how can we escape from own- 
ing that some of the deepest, the most universal needs of 
the human heart have not yet been awakened in us, if we have 
never yet desired to stand under the cross, nor ever claimed 
our part in the great oblation which was made thereon, as 
on the holiest altar ever reared upon the earth — needs which 
that transcendent offering on Calvary was meant for ever and 
perfectly to satisfy 'i It is plain, brethren, that we are lead- 
ing an outside life, playing but with the surfaces of things, 
never having brought ourselves in contact with inmost reali- 
ties, that there never yet has risen upon our souls the awful 
vision of a holy God, thafr we have wholly shrunk from look- 
ing down into the abysmal deeps of our own corruption, if 
as yet we have never cried, u Purge me with hyssop, and I 
shall be clean ; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow." 
For when once we have learned aught of this, we then surely 
feel that not amendment of life, that not tears of sorrow, 
that not the most perfect baptism of repentance, that not all 
these together, would of themselves reach our needs, or re- 
move our stains, or give peace for the past, or confidence for 
the future; that only in the Lamb slain is there purity, or 
pardon, or peace. 



THE PERFECT SACRIFICE. 191 

Oh then, brethren, let us hasten there, where we may 
make that precious blood-sprinkling our own ; let us hasten 
there, lest they rise up against us in the last day — those hea- 
thens, who set such a price on their sacrifices, which were at 
best but shadows of the true ; who made by them such con- 
tinual acknowledgement of guilt which they had contracted, 
of punishment which they deserved, of reconciliation which 
they desired ; lest they rise up, condemning us, who shall 
have counted the blood with which we were sanctified a com- 
mon thing, and brought into the awful presence of the Judge 
a conscience stained and defiled, which yet might have been 
purged and forever perfected by far better sacrifices than 
theirs. 



LECTURE Y. 

THE RESTORER OF PARADISE. 

Genesis V. 29. 

And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us con- 
cerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which 
the Lord hath cursed. 

A word or two may be needful on commencing again 
these lectures, which, after the lapse of some months, I am 
permitted to resume j I may thus hope to remind such among 
my present hearers as have heard the earlier discourses, and 
inform such as have not, what has been their course, and 
what the road we hitherto have traveled over. I have under- 
taken, then, to trace in a few leading lines the yearnings of 
the world which was before Christ, or which, though subse- 
quent to Him, has yet lain without the limits of Christen- 
dom, and beyond the mighty influences of His word and Spirit 
— a world to which He was still therefore a Saviour to come 
— to trace, I say, the yearnings of this world after its Re- 
deemer, and the presentiments of Him which it cherished. 
I have sought to show that if there was much in the world, 
as in a fallen world there needs must have been, ready to re- 
sist and oppose the coming in of the Truth, prompt to take up 
arms against it at its appearing, so also, on the other hand, 
in that it was a world which came first from Grod, and which 
had never been abandoned by Him, but which all along He 
had been in highest wisdom and highest love preparing for 
and leading to this glorious consummation, there were in it 
certain predispositions for the Truth — there was that which 

(192) 



THE RESTORER OF PARADISE. 193 

was ready to range itself under the banners of that Truth, so 
soon as once they were openly set up. I have endeavoured, 
too, to prove that the existence of unconscious prophecies of 
the truth, resemblances in lower spheres of the spiritual life 
to all which at last was perfectly manifested in the highest, 
is one which we should have expected : so that it -is not the 
presence of these resemblances which need perplex us, but 
rather their absence which would have been justly surprising, 
which would have been indeed most difficult to account for. 

I take up my subject at this point, and go forward to ano- 
ther branch of it, seeking to show that in another aspect be- 
side those already contemplated by us, we have in Christ our 
Lord " the Desire of all nations," inasmuch, that is, as we 
have in Him one who was at perfect understanding with na- 
ture, wielded it at his will, declared that He was come to 
restore it, to bring back the lost Paradise; and did not merely 
declare this in word, but by first fruits of power exercised 
upon it, by the mighty works that He did, gave manifest 
tokens that He was come, at once to set it free from the bon- 
dage of corruption, and to set free the race of which He ap- 
peared as the Head from the blind tyranny which it exercised 
upon them — to give to his people something more than the 
Stoic freedom of opposing an intrepid and obdurate heart to 
the assaults of fortune, or the accidents of nature. For 
though that in its place was well, which should enable a man 
to say, amid a falling world, Impavidum ferient ruince, yet 
better still his work, who should so bear up and strengthen 
and establish the shaken pillars of the universe, that wreck 
and ruin should find place in it no more. 

But why, it may be asked, should this deliverance of na- 
ture have been, upon one side, part of the world's expecta- 
tion ? or why, which is in fact the same question on its other 
side, should the giving of this deliverance cohere so inti. 
mately, as we shall see it does, with Christ's redemptive 
work, as to be in fact one aspect of that work itself? For 
17 



194 LECTURE V. 

this reason — because of the closest connection in which the 
disorder from which the redemption was expected, stood re- 
lated to the sin of man. That disorder was felt truly to be 
the echo in nature of the deeper discords in man's spiritual 
being. When man sinned, then in the profound and not 
exaggerated language of our great poet, " All nature felt the 
wound." Man was as the highest note in the scale of crea- 
tion, and, when he descended, through all nature there fol- 
lowed a corresponding reduction. It became subject to 
vanity, not willingly, not by an act of its will, but by reason 
of another, by reason of him who subjected the same, by rea- 
son of man. (Rom. viii. 20.) We behold the fact itself on 
all sides ackowledged — the fact, I mean, of a primal perfec- 
tion, of a present disorder. Of the sense of primal perfection we 
have singular witness in the language (and there is no such 
witness as the unconscious one which language supplies) of 
two of the most highly cultivated nations of the ancient world, 
whom all the present confusions of nature could not hinder 
from using words signifying order and elegance* to designate 
the world which they beheld around them — for so to them 
did this grace and beauty gleam through its present disorders, 
so instinctively did they feel these to belong to the true idea 
of the universe, grievously as that was now defaced and mar- 
red.f While with all this, on the other hand, its present 
disorders appeared so great, its discords so harsh, that the 
Epicurean poet found, as he thonght, warrant and ground 
enough in these for his athiest conclusions, that no hand of 
Eternal Wisdom presided at its planning, that no final causes 

* Kog/jlos and mundus. Pliny (iZ". N.,1. ii, c. 3): Quem xog/xov 
Grasci, nomine ornamenti appellaverunt, eum nos a perfecta absoluta- 
que elegantia mundum. Pythagoras is said to have been the first 
who applied the word x6o/ao$ to the material universe — a word which 
was in its way almost as great an acquisition for natural philosophy, 
as was Plato's ISea for intellectual and spiritual. 

f Compare the Be Natura Deorum, b. ii. 



THE RESTORER OF PARADISE. 195 

could be traced throughout it, but that all was the work of a 
blind chance.* That conclusion of his was indeed most false, 
yet this much was true, that Paradise had disappeared from 
the earth ; and man, the appointed prince of creation, did 
stand among the rebel powers of nature ; which had cast off 
his yoke, at the moment when he cast off the yoke of his 
superior Lord, practising upon him, by a just judgment, the 
disobedience and contumacy which it had learned from him ; 
and which did now, with its thorns and its briers, its wastes 
and its wildernesses, its earthquakes and its storms, present 
him too faithful a reflex of the sin and evil, the desolation 
and barrenness of his own heart. 

Yet, nevertheless, though Paradise was gone, he kept in 
his soul the memory of that which once had been, and with 
the memory the hope and the confidence that it yet would be 
again — that perhaps, though his eyes could see it nowhere, 
it yet had not wholly vanished from the earth. If there 
bloomed no paradise in the present, at least there lay one 
before him and behind. If it lay not near him, yet in 
the distance — in the happy Iran — among the remote Hyper- 
boreansf — in the far land of the blameless Ethiopians. He 
felt, indeed, that he was himself weak to win it back, but he 
could not resign the trust that a champion would raise, and 
accomplish for him that which he was unequal to accomplish 
for himself. Nor was it only when the son of Lamech was 
born that men said in joyful expectation, " This same shall 
comfort us because of the ground the Lord hath cursed." 
Of many more the same hope was fondly conceived. The 
world could hardly picture to itself any one of its leading 
spirits, of the great benefactors of the past, the mighty 
deliverers in the future, without thinking of the curse upon 

- * Lucretius : \" 

Nequicquani nobis divinitus esse paratam 
Naturum rerum, tanid stat prcedita culpa. 
f See Muller's Dorians, b. 2, c. 4. 



196 LECTURE V. 

the earth as more or less lightened in his time and by his aid. 
For it truly understood that however the resistance which we 
find in nature, a resistance so stubborn that only with long 
labour and toil we make it subject to our will, may be part 
of the needful discipline of the present time — may be, though 
good in itself, yet good for our present condition, and some- 
thing which we could not be without — still that release from 
all this, from this resistance and contradiction of the outward 
world, is a portion of the blessedness in store, not indeed so 
much for its own sake, as because it will go hand in hand 
with, and be the outward expression of another and greater 
healing and deliverance in the inner domain of men's spirits. 
This yearning after a lost paradise, this belief that it should 
some day or other be restored, we find existing every where, 
and, as was to be expected, in the worthier religions the most 
vividly. Thus it comes out with a remarkable strength and 
distinctness in that which has so many noble elements in it, 
which is in many respects so remarkably free from the more 
debasing admixtures of most other worships of heathendom 
— I mean the religion of the ancient Persians. Through 
that all, there runs the liveliest expectation of a time when 
every poison and poisonous weed should be expelled from 
the earth, when there should be no more ravening beast, 
nor fiery simoon, when streams should break forth in every 
desert, when the bodies of men should cast no shadows, when 
they should need no food to sustain their life, when there 
should be no more poverty, nor sickness, nor old age, nor 
death. 

And, what is most remarkable, makes these expectations 
to belong to our argument is, that not in Jewish prophecy 
alone were these hopes, and the fulfillment of these hopes, 
linked with, and consequent upon, the coming of a righteous 
king, one of whom, righteousness should be the girdle of his 
loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins, who should re- 
prove with equity the meek of the earth, (Isai. xi. 4, 5 ; ) 



THE RESTORER OF PARADISE. 197 

but in all the anticipations upon all sides of these blessings 
to men, they were thus connected with the expectations of a 
king reigning in righteousness. In his time, and because 
of his presence, these blessings should accrue : he should 
be himself the middle point of blessing, from which all 
should flow out. For there was a just sense in men, which 
hindered them from ever looking for, or conceiving of, 
any blessings apart from a person with whom they were 
linked, and from whom they were diffused. Even in the 
Pollio of the great Latin poet, however little interpreters are 
at one concerning the wondrous child, the kindler of such 
joyful expectations, however unsatisfying the common expla- 
nation must be confessed to be, yet this much is certain, that 
the poet could not conceive or dream of a mere natural gol- 
den age. It must centre in and unfold itself from a living 
person : it must stand in a real relation to his appearing, be- 
ing the outcoming and reflection of his righteousness. The 
world's history can have no sentimental and idyllic, it must 
needs have an epic and heroic close. 



But, it may be asked, Are we justified in looking at this 
expectation as the expectation of something which is to be 
indeed made ours in Him that is true ? All will, I think, 
allow that the prospect of a restored paradise — in other words, 
of a world lightened of its curse, does belong to the very 
essence of our Christian hope — that there was a truth in the 
ancient Chiliasm, which all its sensual exaggerations should 
not induce us to slight or to put aside, in so far, that is, as it 
was a protest against the dishonour which would have been 
put upon a part of Glod's creation, or rather upon the com- 
pleteness of the redemption of that part, if it had been re- 
garded as so utterly and irrecoverably spoiled, that now it 
could only be destroyed, and not renewed. Assuredly, the 
hope of this recovery forms part of the anticipations of pro- 
phets. The waste places of the world, those outward signs 



198 LECTURE V. 

of sin impressed visibly on nature, shall disappear; "the 
wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad/' What 
glory the world yet keeps shall be enhanced and infinitely 
multiplied : " The light of the moon shall be as the light of 
the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the 
light of seven days, in the day that the Lord bindeth up the 
breach of his people, and healeth the stroke of their wound."* 
(Isai. xxx. 26.) All the discords which have followed hard 
upon the fall shall be hushed to peace : " The wolf also shall 
dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the 
kid." (Isai. xi. 10.) And apostles take up the strain : they 
too declare how " the whole creation groaneth and travaileth 
in pain together untill now;" how "the earnest expectation 
of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of 
God." (Rom. viii. 19.) They see, in ecstatic vision, not 
merely a new heaven, but a new earth, and One sitting 
upon his throne who says, "Behold, I make all things new." 
(Rev. xxi. 5.) 

And we have, not lying thus on the surface of Scripture, 
other obscurer yet not less significant indications of the inti- 
mate connexion between the restoration of man and the re- 
storation of the outward world — as, for instance, in the use 
of the same word in the New Testament to signify the one 
and the other. There is a regeneration of man ; but the 
same word (rtaUyy£i)£cr<V) is most significantly applied to na- 
ture also, and expresses that great and transcendant change 
which for it is also in store. (Matt. xix. 28). There is for it 
also a new birth, for so much this word thus applied tells us, 
no less than for man — a casting off of its old and wrinkled 
skin — a resurrection morn, when it, too, shall put on its 
Easter garments; when, as some foster-nurse, it shall share 
in the glory of the royal child whom it has reared ; and who, 

* For the way in which the Jewish commentators understood. such 
passages as these, see Schoottgen, Hor. Heb., v. ii., pp. 62, 171; 
and Eisenmenger's Entdeckt Judenthum, y. ii., p. 826.. 



THE RESTORER OF PARADISE. 199 

at length ascending the throne of his kingdom, is mindful 
of her in whose lap in time past he has been nurtured.* 
Man's regeneration is indeed a present one, and nature's, in 
the main, a future j yet are they but workings, in narrower 
and wider spheres, of the same almighty power, and so may 
thus justly be called by the same name. 

Nor by word alone, but also by pregnant symbol it was 
declared that this redemption was a part of that work which 
the Son of Man came to effect. For I cannot doubt that 
there was a symbolic pointing at what had been lost, and 
what was to be won back, in the fact of the temptation of 
our blessed Lord taking place in the wilderness. The garden 
and the wilderness are thus set forth to us as the two oppo- 
site poles. By sin, the first Adam lost the garden — which 
henceforward disappeared from the earth, so that the very 
site of it has since been vainly sought — and from that day 
forth the wilderness was man's appointed home. Christ, 
therefore, the second Adam, taking up the conflict exactly 
at the point where the first Adam had left it, and inheriting, 
so to speak, all the consequences of his defeat, did, in the 
wilderness, do battle with the foe, and triumphing in right- 
eousness, won back the garden for man — which, though we 
see it not yet, will in due time unfold itself from Him and 
as one of the fruits of his victory; for the centre being won, 
the circumference will be won also. We recognize a slight 
hint of the meaning that lay in making the wilderness the 
scene of this great conflict, in that which one Evangelist 
alone records, and which might at first sight seem but as a 
stroke added to enhance the desolate savageness of his abode : 
"He was with the wild beasts." (Mark i. 13.) But surely 
it means that in Him, the ideal man, the paradise preroga- 

* Chrysostom : Kaddrtep yap fiQqvr], rtaiblov tpstyovaa jSatftktxov, 
f Til tijs apA^Js ixstvov yivo^iivov trj$ rtdtpi,x7j^ xa.1 (wtrj avvartohajveti 
■tup dyaOujv, ovtoi xo.1 57 xtlois. 



200 LECTURE V. 

tives were given back — the fear of Him, and the dread of 
Him, were over all the beasts of the field : " He was with 
them," and they harmed him not, but did rather own Him 
as their rightful lord. 

Nor may we confine to that single act of our Lord's life 
the tokens which he gave that he should be this deliverer of 
nature; nor may we say that the glory of a redeemed nature 
is a glory which as yet altogether waits to be revealed. 
Rather is it already and most truly begun. In his miracles 
we see the germs and beginnings of its liberation. In them, 
nature is no longer stiff, but fluent — its laws, so stubborn to 
others, become elastic in his hands; before him, each of its 
mountains becomes a plain — it listens for, and hears, and 
obeys the lightest intimation of his will. 

That all this had need so to be in the presence of one 
claiming to be all which he claimed, that it all stood in vital 
and intimate connection with his work, was most truly felt 
by a world which evermore adorned its champions with like 
powers, which evermore conceived of them as workers of 
wonders, as bringers back in like manner, of the lost har- 
monies of creation, and conceived of nature as plastic in their 
hands and obedient to their will. It was a true instinct, 
however mistaken in the person to whom the wondrous works 
were ascribed, out of which the world concluded that he who 
professed to deliver his fellows must not be bound upon any 
side with the same heavy yoke as they were — that the very 
idea of a champion of mankind, was that of one in whom 
should be found again all the lost prerogatives of every 
man. 

And when we thus say that the miracles which Christ 
wrought were these signs and tokens of redemption, let us 
not pause here, nor contemplate them as insulated facts — 
once, and once only, having been — but rather as facts preg- 
nant with ulterior consequences ; as the earliest steps of a se- 
ries; as first fruits of a gracious power which did not stop 



THE RESTORER OF PARAEISE. 201 

with them, but has ever since continued to unfold itself more 
and more. What Christ once, and in them, wrought in in- 
tensive power, he works evermore in extensive. Once or 
twice he multiplied the bread j but evermore in Christian 
lands famine is become a stranger — a more startling, because 
a more unusual thing — the culture of the earth proceeding 
with surer success and with a larger return. A few times 
he healed the sick; but, in the reverence for man's body 
which his gospel teaches, in the sympathy for all forms of 
suffering which flows out of it, in the sure advance of all 
worthier science which it implies and ensures, in and by aid 
of all this, these miraculous cures unfold themselves into the 
whole art of Christian medicine, into all the alleviations and 
removements of pain and disease, which are so rare in other 
(and so frequent in Christian) lands. Once he quelled the 
storm ; but, in the clear dominion of man's spirit over the 
material universe, which Christianity gives in the calm cour- 
age which it inspires, a lordship over the winds and waves, 
and over all the blind uproar of nature, is secured, which 
only can again be lost with the loss of all the spiritual gifts 
with which he has indued his people. Already Paul was 
de facto admiral in that great tempest upon the Adrian sea. 
Thus, then, brethren, we see that the world's expectation 
upon this side also has an answering fact. There is One who 
does truly give what the hearts of men have desired. Their 
longing after a redeemed creation was no delusive dream, 
however the ways in which they realized that longing, and 
gave it an outward shape, were premature and vain. And 
here you will bear with me, even though I repeat an admo- 
nition once made already, but the importance of which will 
abundantly justify its repetition. Let us then for ourselves 
take care that we view aright these askings after the true, 
and understand what they mean : let us see that they be not, 
by the fraud of men, used against us, to undermine, or, at 
least, to embarrass, the faith which they ought to help to es- 



LECTURE V. 202 

tablish. We have spoken already of the way in which they 
might be so used. The slight upon the miracle of Scripture, 
and all other God's mighty gifts to the world by his Son, 
through the adducing of other works seemingly of a like 
kind, other similar pretensions made by, or on behalf of, 
others — the mingling, and so losing sight of the divine facts 
amid a multitude of phenomena apparently similar — this op- 
position to the truth has been often attempted, but is proba- 
bly now working itself out into a more consistent theory, 
and one more conscious of itself, and what it means, and 
what advantages it posseses, than ever in times past it has 
done. 

The evading of the stress of Christ's works by the reply, 
that such have been the accompaniment of every heroic per- 
sonage, glories and ornaments which the imagination of his 
fellows has inevitably lent him, the halo with which it has 
clothed him — for instance, that it has evermore been pre- 
sumed that the outer world will obey him, no reluctant slave 
to his material force, but a ready servant to his spiritual will ; 
— this manner of dealing with the marvelous works of 
Christ, is likely to find great favour in our time. Nor is it 
hard to see the reason. It falls in remarkably with the ten- 
dency of our age. It retains, and is consistent with a cer- 
tain measure of respect towards the records of revelation. For 
it does not presume those parts of them which affirm super- 
natural facts to be a fraud or forgery, nor yet to be the re- 
cord of deceptions and sleights of hand, but only that the 
men to whom we owe these accounts lay under the same 
laws, were subject to the same optical illusions in the spirit- 
ual world as all their fellows, as belong to the very essence 
of man's nature, it fared with them but as with others, that 
the mighty desire became father to the belief. This theory 
offers a way of dealing with a great multitude of statements 
presented as historic, which men are unwilling to brand out- 
right as falshoods, and yet as little willing to accept as truths. 



THE RESTORER OF PARADISE. 203 

It offers a middle course, decently respectful to Christianity, 
and at the same time effectually escaping from its authority, 
and presenting, as it -seems to do, a calm and philosophical 
explanation, both for its more perplexing phenomena, and 
also for very much beyond it, it will be strange if, in our age, 
which rejoices so much in large and inclusive points of view, 
it does not find a ready and a wide acceptance. 

But in truth, brethren, this universal imagination, these 
consenting expectations upon all sides, in so many thousands 
and thousands of hearts, these, if we believe in a divine 
origin and destination of man, if we believe that this man or 
that may be deceived, but that all men cannot — since what- 
ever there may be of false at the surface, the foundations of 
his being are laid in the truth, being laid in G-od — if we be- 
lieve that this or that generation may be dreaming fantastic 
and feverish dreams, which have no counterparts whatever 
in the actual world of realities, but not all generations — if 
there is that in us which, prior to all argument, solemnly 
binds us to believe that no such cruel falsehood would be 
played off upon man as a great longing laid deep in his heart, 
without a corresponding object — then to us believing so, 
these wide spread, or say rather these universal expectations, 
will themselves give testimony to a truth corresponding to 
them. We shall not indeed look for a truth answering to them 
in all their accidents, for of these many will be local, tempo- 
rary, varying, and the truth, when it comes to pass, must more 
or less depart and differ from that form in which it clothed 
itself to them who waited for it. So of neccesity it must be ; 
for that form perforce was more or less injuriously affected, 
distorted, and obscured by that sinful element, which in the 
mind of each would mingle with, and in part debase and de- 
grade it. But there will be a testimony in these consenting 
expectations for that which lies at the root of, and after the 
merely accidental is stripped off, remains common to, and so 
constitutes the essence of them all. 



204 LECTURE V. 

And when we are deeply convinced of this, then in all 
those in whom the world has greatly hoped — workers, as it 
has been thought, of wondrous works — bringers back of a 
golden age — utterers, as has been fondly deemed, of the for- 
gotten spell of power — graspers anew of the scepter over 
nature which had fallen from the hand of every one beside 
— readers backward of the primal curse — in the mighty acts 
attributed to each one of these, we shall trace proofs of the 
exceeding fitness which there was, that He who indeed came 
in the fullness of the time, should come furnished with signs 
and wonders and mighty works, so that even the winds and 
the sea obeyed Him, and the bread multiplied in his hands, 
and the wild beasts knew him for their lord, and in the 
desert, Paradise bloomed anew at his presence. In legend 
and in tale utterly worthless as history we shall yet read pro- 
phetic intimations, which indeed understood not themselves, 
of Him who, in the days of his flesh, by first fruits of power, 
declared Himself the promised Seed of the woman who 
should comfort us for the earth which God had cursed, and 
at length bring about its perfect redemption from that curse, 
making it, thus redeemed, a fit dwelling-place for his re- 
deemed people. 



LECTURE VI. 

THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 

Romans VII. 21, 23. 

I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. 
For I delight in the law of God after the inward man ; hut 1 see ano- 
ther law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and 
bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. 

We were occupied, -when last we met together, with the 
world's expectation of one who should deliver all outward na- 
ture from its curse, of one in whom the Adamic prerogatives 
should re-appear. To-day I shall be led, as by a natural 
transition, to speak of a yet nearer deliverance, and one 
which it imported to man yet more that he should win, or 
-that another should win for him — a harmony which he de- 
manded with a yet more earnest longing than this harmony 
of nature with itself, or of nature with him — an inner har- 
mony, a deliverance from his own evil, from that in himself 
which was threatening his true being with destruction, from 
lusts which embraced his soul, but while they embraced, 
strangled and destroyed. For sin has never reigned so un- 
disputed a lord in his heart, but that there were voices there 
protesting against its lordship. His will was enslaved ; but 
he knew that it was enslaved, that freedom was its birth- 
right, and that bondage, however it might be its miserable 
necessity now, yet was not its true condition from the first. 

It was the sense of this, of such an inner contradiction in 
his life, which made one to exclaim that he felt as if two 

18 (205) 



- 



206 LECTURE VI. 

souls were lodged within him 5* and another to set forth the 
soul of man as a chariot, which two horses, one white and 
one black, were drawing - )* — so did the wondrous fact present 
itself to him, of the flesh lusting against the spirit, and the 
spirit against the flesh, so had he learned that if there is 
that in every man which is drawing him up to God and to the 
finding his true freedom in God, there is also that which would 
fain draw him downward, till he utterly lose himself and his 
own true life in the mire of sensual and worldly lusts, till 
the divine in him be wholly obscured, and the bestial pre- 
dominant altogether. J It was the sense of this, which made 
the image of the two ways, a downward and an upward — 
one easy and strewn with flowers, but a way of death ; one 
hard and steep and sharp set with thorns, but a Way of life, 
as familiar to heathen moralists§ as to us who hear of the 
broad and narrow way, the wide and the straight gate, from 
the lips of the Lord himself. 

And thus the problem which each nobler system proposed 

* Xenophon, Cyropced., 1. 6, c. 1, §41. Cf. Seneca (Up. 52) : 
Quid est hoc, Lucili, quod nos alio tendentes alio trahit et ed unde 
recedere cupimus, impellit 1 quid colluctatur cum animo nostro, nee 
permittit nobis quidquam semel velle ? 

f Plato, Phosdrus, c. 25. 

J This sense of the latent beast, or the more latent beasts than 
one, in every man, which may be fed and pampered, and roused to 
fiercest activity, -while the true man in him perishes with hunger, 
supplies the groundwork of that famous and often imitated passage 
in Plato. Rep., 1. 9, c. 12. 

§ Hesiod, Op. 289—292; cebes, Tab., c. 12; Xenophon, Memorab., 
1. 2, c. 1, $ 21 seq.; in regard to which last passage there is a very 
interesting discussion in Buttman's admirable elucidation of the 
myths of Herakles. (Mytool., v. 1, p. 252.) He there shows that, 
according to all likelihood, the " temptation " of Herakles belonged 
to the original legend, and was not the mere poetical invention of 
Prodicus. Lactantius (Inst. Div., 1. 6, c. 3.) notes how heathen poet 
and philosopher had already used this image of the two ways. . 



THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 207 

to itself was the delivering from this evil, the bringing of a 
harmony into the inner life — its end to make man a king, so 
that he should have dominion over himself, and over all of 
his nature which was not truly himself — that which was ap- 
pointed to rule in him, ruling, and that which was appointed 
to serve, serving — the charioteer charioting, and not drag- 
ged in the dust at the heels of his horses. The promise 
which it held out of giving this, was that which to every 
more earnest spirit each system had of attractive, and only 
as it promised this, had it an attraction to them. They only 
felt drawn to it, as it undertook to give them this liberty, 
and harmoniously to re-adjust the disturbed relations of their 
inward life. 

I know that when we undertake to speak of these things, 
and would fain show in how wonderful a degree the ancient 
world was engaged with the same moral and spiritual prob- 
lems as are engaging ourselves, there is a caution which we 
must take home to ourselves, if we would not trace entirely 
delusive resemblances, and be led away by merely accidental 
likenesses in expression, which yet point to no real likeness 
at the root ) this caution, I mean — that since there are points 
of apparent contact in almost all systems, it follows that be- 
fore we can find any significance in these, or conclude one 
because of them to stand in any real affinity to another, we 
must strictly ask ourselves, how deep these resemblances go, 
whether they lie merely on the surface, or reach down to the 
central heart of the matter, to that which determines the 
nature of each ; whether we have been caught by words and 
phrases which have a similar sound, but which, looked into 
more nearly, will be found to conceal under language which 
sounds nearly the same, statements which are really and es- 
sentially most diverse. This mistake no doubt has often 
been made ; phrases have been snatched at and claimed as 
ours, as anticipating and bearing witness to Christian truths, 
without waiting to inquire what place they really hold in the 



208 LECTURE VI. 

complex of the system from which they are taken. Thus a 
Latin Father* has spoken of Seneca as " one of us" on the 
score of certain showy maxims which sound, at first hearing, 
and till they are adjusted in their place, like great Christian 
truths ; and this, though perhaps there could not have been 
two schemes more opposite at the heart to one another than 
that Stoic, which in its pride would teach us to seek all in 
ourselves, and the Christian, which bids us with an hum- 
bler yet truer wisdom to seek all out of ourselves and in 
God. 

But at the same time, and owning our liability to be thus 
deceived, we must yet keep far from that other course, which, 
shunning the faults and exaggerations of this, refuses to see 
stirring at all in the heathen world the same riddles of life 
and of death which are perplexing ourselves. Into this ex- 
treme they run, who will give any explanation rather than a 
moral one, and the more trivial the better, to the legend and 
the tale of antiquity, obstinately refusing to hear in the most 
earnest voices which reach them from the past cries after the 
same deliverence for which we yearn. The tendency to this 
is in truth at its root antichristian ; for it grows, whether it 
owns it or not, out of a conviction that all with which Christian- 
ity deals is in fact accidental, and does not belong to the essen- 
tial stuff of humanity — that this revelation of which we 
boast, has no claim to be considered as an answer to the 
deepest and most universal needs of men — that echoes of it 
therefore are nowhere to be listened for, or being caught, are 
in no wise to be accounted more than accidental reverbera- 
tions of the air. 

Keeping then that caution in view, but as a caution only, 
and resistiDg, as we are bound to do, the endeavour to rob 
the whole heathen world, its philosophy and mythology alike, 
of all moral significance for us, on the score that significance 

* Jerome (Adv. Jovin., 1. 1, in fine) : Noster Seneca. 



THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 



209 



has sometimes been found where truly there was none, we 
may boldly say that the highest philosophy of the old world 
did concern itself with a redemption — not of course with a 
Redeemer, for of such it knew not ; but it did avowedly set 
before itself as its aim and purpose the helping of souls to a 
birth out of a world of shows and appearances into the world 
of realities, out of a world of falsehood into one of truth, 
turning them from darkness to light, from the contemplation 
of shadows to the contemplation of substance.* That favour- 
ite saying of Socrates that he exercised still the craft of his 
mother, that his task and work, his mission in the world, 
was such a helping of souls to the birth, by the helping to 
a birth the conceptions which were struggling there,f this 
rested on no other thought — was in its kind, and however 
remotely a prelude to far mightier truth, the earthly antici- 
pation of a heavenly word, of his word who said, " Ye must 
be born again." It pointed, though at an infinite distance, 
to the possibility of a birth into a kingdom, not merely of 
reality as opposed to semblance, but of holiness as opposed 
to sin. J 

What again is " Know thyself," that great saying of the 
heathen philosophy, in which, when it. turned from being 
merely physical, and a speculation about natural appearances, 
the sun, the moon, and the stars, to the making of man and 



* The great passage in the Republic of Plato. 1. 7, c. 1, 2, will 
at once suggest itself to many. 

f Plato's Thecetetus, c. 6. Stallbaum's edit. p. 63. See Van 
Heusde's Initio, Philosophies Platonicce, v. 2, p. 52 seq. 

J And so, too, there are counterparts, weak and pale ones they 
must needs be, of the Christian idea of conversion, which find place 
in the same philosophy. How remarkable are the very terms, 
/xstati'tpotyri a,7ib twv oxvmv irti "to <£wj {Pep. 1. 7, C. 13,) rtfpctfT'pofiw, 
•\v$yi$ Tteptoyoy^, [Rep. 7, c C,) with which we may compare the 
irticttpsfyeoQai, of the New Testament, 2 Cor. iii. 16; 1 Thess. i. 9; 
Acts xviii. 18. 

18* 



210 LECTURE VI. 

man's being the region in which it moved, the riddles of hu- 
manity, the riddles which it sought to solve* — what was that 
" Know thyself," that great word in which it embodied and 
expressed so well its own character and aim, and all that it 
proposed to effect, but a preparation afar off for a higher 
word, the "Repent ye," of the Gospel? Since let that 
precept only be faithfully carried out, and in what else could 
it issue but repentance ? or at least in what else but in an 
earnest longing after this great change of heart and life ? 
For out of this self-knowledge nothing else but self-loathing 
could grow — so that men being once come, as they presently 
must, to a consciousness of their error and their departure 
from goodness and truth, should hate themselves, and flee 
from themselves to whatever higher guide was offered them; 
to the end that they might become different men, and not 
remain the same which before they were.f What could any 
man behold himself, if only he beheld himself aright, but, 
to use the wonderful comparison of Plato,J as that sea-god, 

* Cicero, Tusc. Qucest., 1. 5, c. 4. 

-j- See the affecting words, which Plato (Synops., c. 32,) puts into 
the mouth of Alcibiades, concerning the mysterious and magical 
power of the truth, even as partially embodied in the words and 
person of Socrates, to conceive of sin ; until, as the young man own- 
ed, it seemed to him that it were far better not to live than to live 
the man he was. (juGTfs pot, 86%ao /a-tj jStcotfor slvai £%ovti, wj ez^O 

J De Rep., 1. 10, c. 11 : 'Oorjtsp ol ibv Oaxdtifcov Vkavxov opwv- 
*£$, ovx dv stt padlios avtov Z8ol£v tTjv dp%aiav tyvcitv, V7tb toy id 
Ts rtaXata toy au>/Mxtos ^pvj td filv sxxsxhaGQai,, td 8s awtftpify- 
6at xai rtdvtus hsKidfirjodai, vtCo tu>v xvp-dtiov, aTiTta 8a Ttpoprtstyv- 
%,'svai ocffpfa ts xai tyvxoa xai TtsVpas, £>a?£ rtavti (xaVkov $?jpi,co ioc- 
xhai r\ oloj %v tyvtiec. ovti* xai trjv ^v%r]v J^ust? 9s^/xe9a StaxsL/xsv^v 
vrib {ivpiu>v xaxtov. This Glaucus, as the Socialist tells us, discovered 
the fountain of immortality, of which he drank ; but not being able 
to show it to others, was by them hurled into the deeps of the sea. 
From time to time the fishermen catch sight of him, or hear him 



THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 211 

in whom that pristine form was now scarcely to be recognized, 
so were some limbs of his body broken off, and some mar- 
red and battered by the violence of the waves, while to the 
rest shells and stones and sea-weed had clung and overgrown 
them, till he bore a resemblance rather to some monster 
than to that which by nature he was ? What was man but 
such a wreck of his nobler self, what but such a monster 
could he show in his own eyes, if only he could be prevailed 
to fix those eyes steadfastly upon himself. 

And when men, thus learning their fall, and how great it 
-was, learned also to long for their restoration, very interest- 
ing and instructive is it to observe how Christ realized for 
yearning souls not only the very thing which they asked for, 
but that in the very forms under which they had asked it; 
most instructive to observe how the very language of Scrip- 
ture, in which it sets forth the gifts which a Saviour brings, 
was a language which more or less had been used already to 
set forth the blessings which men wanted, or which from 
others they had most imperfectly obtained — the Gospel of 
Christ falling in not only with the wants of souls, but with 
the very language in which those wants had found utterance. 

Thus there had continually spoken out in men, a sense of 
that which they needed to be done for them, as a heali7ig, as a 
binding up of hurts, a staunching of wounds. The art of 
the physician did but image forth a higher cure and care, 
which should concern itself not with the bodies, but with the 
souls, of men. They were but the branches of one and the 
same discipline, so much so, that the same god who was con- 
ceived master in one, the soother of passions, was master also 
in the other, the healer of diseases. It was conceived of sins 
as of stripes and wounds, which would leave their livid marks, 

bewailing his immortality. The way in which this mythus is used 
"by Plato, is a testimony for the profound meaning which he found 
in it. 



212 LECTURE VI. 

their enduring scars, on the miserable souls which had com- 
mitted them, and which carried these evidences of their 
guilt, visibly impressed on them for ever, into that dark 
world, and before those awful judgment-seats, whither after 
death they were bound.* 

How deep the corresponding image of Christ T s work as 
a work of healing, reaches in Scripture, I need not remind 
you. His ministry of grace had been set forth in language 
borrowed from this art, by prophets who went before ; He 
should be anointed to heal the broken-hearted, to bind up 
the bruised; and when he began that ministry, He claimed 
these prophecies for Himself, laying his finger on the most 
signal among them, and saying, " This day is this Scripture 
fulfilled in your ears." (Luke iv. 21.) Aod then, too, we 
shall all remember how in another place He spake of sin- 
ners as being sick, and Himself as their physician, (Matt. 
ix. 12.) and by the good Samaritan it has been often thought 
more than likely, that He shadowed forth Himself, the de- 
spised of his own people, and yet the true binder up of the 
bleeding hurts of humanity. But what need of more proof, 
when we use the very word healtk\ as equivalent for salva- 
tion. That fearful saying of the heathen sage remains most 
true, that every sin is a wound, that it leaves behind it its 
scar, invisible now, — for it is a scar not on the body, but 
the soul, — which will yet be only too plainly visible in the 
day of the revelation of all things. Yet He so heals them 
whom He takes in hand, He makes so perfect a cure, that 
not even the scars of their hurts shall remain; "by whose 
stripes ye are healed." He only waited till there was an 
earnest desire awakened in men that they might find them- 

* Plato, Gorgias, c. 80, Stallbaum's edit. p. 314. Tacitus [Annal. 
6) has a fierce delight in applying these words to Tiberius. 

f Thus Plato {Be Rep., 1. 4, c. 18, Stallbaum's edit. p. 324 ;\ 
Apetirj fiev apa wj eooxev, vyleia tie t?l$ oa> smj xai xoXkos xai eve^ia 
"kvxijsi xaxia 8e ocfoj tie xo.i alo%6s xai aadeveia 



THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 213 

selves in an hospital of souls — till these desires came to a 
head, — till it was felt that all which was offered elsewhere 
reached not to an effectual binding up of hurts, was but a 
healing of them slightly, presently to break out anew, or a 
covering of them over with purple and with gold, leaving 
them the while to fester unhindered beneath. He only 
waited till it was owned that a divine Physician, and none 
other, could take the great sufferer in hand, and then 
straightway He stood by the sufferer's side, and proffered him 
all that he had asked for, but had now despaired of finding, 
even help and healing, and these in the very forms under 
which he had asked them.* 

Nor was it otherwise with the idea of freedom, — an idea 
which lies so close to the very heart and centre of the 
Gospel, that its benefits and blessings are perhaps oftener 
set forth by a word borrowed from this circle of images 
than by any other, oftener described as a redemption or a 
purchase out of slavery, and Christ as a Redeemer or pur- 
chaser, and thus a setter free, than by any other language. 
It is true that we have come to use these words with so 
little earnestness, have taken them so much in vain, we have 
so lightly passed them backward and forward from hand to 
hand, that the sharpness and distinctness of their first out- 
line has been for us almost lost and worn away, so that they 
scarcely, or only now and then, with any vividness, bring to 
our minds the truths which they affirm — the awful truth of 
that slavery out of which we were delivered, the glorious 
truth of that liberty into which we have been brought. But 
still these words, though we may forget it, do evermore 
proclaim this ; and they are words by which, oftener per- 
haps than by any other, the Holy Spirit in the Scripture 

* Augustine (Serm. 87, c. 10:) Jacet toto orbe terrarum ab oriente 
usque in occidentem grandis segrotus. Ad sanandum grandem 
aegrotum descendit omnipotens medicus. Humiliavit se usque ad 
xnortalem carnem, tamquam usque ad lectum Eegrotantis. 



214 LECTURE VI. 

declares the benefits whereof Christ has made us partakers. 
And being this Redeemer or setter free, He was in this 
regard also "the Desire of all nations." For He, when 
He said " Whosoever committeth sin, is the servant of 
sin," (John viii. 34.) when his apostle characterized him- 
self in his natural state as a slave " sold under sin," (Rom. 
vii. 14.) when another of His apostles spoke of evil men as 
"servants of corruption," (2 Pet. ii. 19.) He and they, 
using this language, were but affirming the same which had 
been found out and felt by every sinner that ever lived, of 
which the confession had been wrung out, too, from the 
lips of thousands. When, too, he offered freedom, a vic- 
tory over all which was bringing into bondage, an over- 
coming of the world, as the issue of obedience unto Him, 
He was but offering that, which in one shape or another, 
each guide and teacher of his fellows had offered before, — 
with indeed the mighty difference, that He could make good 
his offer, and they not. I need not remind you with what fre- 
quency we meet, sometimes almost to satiety, declarations of 
this kind, — of wisdom being the only freedom, — the wise 
man, the only free man, the only king, — of the soul of the 
sinner as a tyrant-ridden city,* — of lusts as evil mistresses 
which enslave the soul and bring it into bondage ; how the 
promise of liberty is on the lips of each who would gather 
disciples around him. All this is strewn too thickly over 
the pages of heathen literature to need any proof in particular. 
And meeting these statements thus frequently and thus 
earnestly expressed as we often do meet them there, we must 
see how they bear testimony that men continually envisaged 
the highest benefits which their souls could attain, under the 
aspect of freedom, of redemption — that the attaining of 
this freedom was the object of their lives and hopes, how- 
ever little they could make it their own, however they dis- 

* Plato, Rep., 1. 9, c. 5. 



THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 215 

covered and were meant to discover, through their fruitless 
struggles and toils, that only when the Son made them free, 
they could be free indeed. 

Again, a pointing at the crowning gift which was at 
length given unto the world in Him, may be traced in the 
idea of music which was so frequently and so fondly used 
as the best outward expression of inner life-harmony. This 
indeed was felt to have so singular and profound a fitness, 
that a term borrowed from this art, was, we may say, for- 
mally adopted as the aptest for setting forth that whole 
discipline which occupied itself with the right composure 
of the higher powers, with the bringing into one concent 
the three-fold nature of man : — he in whom this language 
comes most prominently forward, finding no worthier terms 
in which to describe that wisdom with which he was en- 
amoured, than as the fairest and mightiest of the harmonies j* 
while sin, on the contrary, presented itself to him and to 
many more, as a deep inner disharmony, as a discord which 
had forced itself into the innermost centre of man's life, and 
only through the expulsion of which he could again make it 
what it ought to be, rhythmic, numerous, and harmonious. 
All these thoughts, which, though first expressed by one or 
two, yet found echoes in the bosoms of all, how did they in 
their weakness to realize themselves, in the fact that dis- 
cords ever made themselves too plainly felt in the lives, not 
of the taught only, but of the teachers as well — how did 
they ask for One, the mighty master of all spiritual melo- 
dies : whose own life, free from one jarring note, should 
make perfect music in the ears of Grod ; and not this alone, 
but who should attune once more that marvellous instru- 
ment which had lain silent so long, or from which discords 
only had proceeded, even the soul of man, and draw from it 

* Plato (Z>e Legg.,\. 3:) KaUiW^ xai (AsyiGt^v tZ>v avfi^wtuv. 



216 LECTURE VT. 

again sounds which should be sweet even in the ears accus- 
tomed to the symphonies of heaven. 

Surely all their language, though they knew it not, 
pointed to such a mighty master of heavenly harmonies as 
this. For if it be true of Him, that as He emptied the 
golden seats of Olympus, and swept their long line of 
heroes and demi-gods and gods into the darkness and cor- 
ruption of the tomb, He gathered from each idol as it fell 
its pretended majesty and dominion and power, claiming all 
rightfully for his own, and weaving all the scattered rays of 
light into one crown of glory for his own head ; then of 
none of these could this be more truly spoken than of Him 
whom men feigned to be the god of harmony, to have po- 
tency thereby over the spirits of men, with power to exalt, 
to purify, and to soothe, whose music acted as a charm to 
tranquilize the passions and attune the spirit to a peace 
with itself, and with all which was around it.* For Chris- 
tian peace, the peace which Christ gives, the peace which 
He sheds abroad in the heart, is it aught else than such a 
glorified harmony — the expelling from man's life of all that 
was causing disturbance there, all that was hindering him 
from chiming in with the music of heaven, all that would 
have made him a jarring and a dissonant note, left out from 
the great dance and minstrelsy of the spheres, in which 
mingle the consenting songs of redeemed men and elect 
angels, f 

* Miiller's Dorians, b. 2, c. 8, \ 11. 

f It is remarkable enough that although Christian art shrunk, 
and, so long as there was a heathenism rampant round it, rightly 
shrunk, from any large use of symbols borrowed from heathen my- 
thology, yet pictures of Christ as Orpheus taming the wild beasts 
with his lyre, are probably as old as the third century. (Chri&tl. 
Kunst-Symbolik, p. 134, and Piper's Mythologie der Christl. Kunst, p. 
121.) Compare the opening of the latter Clement's Cohort, ad 
Gentes, and Eusebius, De Laud. Constantini, c. 14, p. 760, ed. 
Reading. 



THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 217 

Thus did the Son of God at his coming in the flesh, take 
up the unfulfilled promises of all human systems. For they 
were unfulfilled ; those systems had wrought no deliverance 
worthy of the name in the earth. How scanty was the 
number of those whom they would even undertake to save, 
— a few highly favored or greatly gifted spirits of the world 
— not the poor, the ignorant, the weak; in this how dif- 
ferent from that Gospel which is preached to the poor, and 
whose tidings are good because they are these, — that the 
Lord hath founded Zion, and the poor of his people shall put 
their trust therein ! But theirs was essentially an aristo- 
cratic salvation,* which should help a few, setting them 
apart from their fellows, on pinnacles from whence they 
were in danger of looking down far more with gratulation 
at their own deliverance, than with any inward and bleed- 
ing compassion for the multitudes which were toiling and 
vainly seeking for a path below. And indeed often it was 
not a salvation at all, even in the very lowest sense of that 
word ; how often was it Satan casting out Satan — one form 
of evil expelling another, men finding food for pride and 
vain-glory in the very advances in wisdom and self-restraint 
which they had madef — and thus those very victories which 
they had won over fleshly sins, helping to make them slaves 

* See Origen's admirable words in his reply to Celsus (Con. Cels , 
1. 7, c. 59, 60,) showing how at the best the philosophers were 
latpoo o^tycov, but Christ the tarpoj rtoTiJW. 

■f The well-known passage of Cicero (De Nat. Deor. 1. 3, c. 36) 
has been often quoted. Men justly thank the Gods for the external 
commodities which they enjoy ; but, he proceeds, Virtutern nemo 
unquam acceptam Deo retulit. Nimirum recte, propter yirtutem 
enim jure laudamur, et in virtute recte gloriamur. Quod non con- 
tiDgeret, si id donum a Deo, non a nobis haberemus.-.iVaTO quis, quod 
vir bonus esset, gratias Diis egit unquam ? At quod dives, quod hono- 
ratus, quod incolumis. Jovemque Optimum Maximum ob eas res 
appellant, non quod nos justos, temperantes, sapientes efficiat, sed 
quod salvos, incolumes, opulentos, copiosos. 

19 



218 LECTURE VI. 

of spiritual wickednesses — of the seven worse spirits which 
take possession of the house, empty and swept and gar- 
nished ; from which the one spirit of sensual lust has gone 
out, but which has not been occupied by any nobler guest. 

And if, brethren, even our struggles, after an inward con- 
formity to a higher rule, are what they are — if with all the 
helps at our command, we yet win no step without an effort, 
if oftentimes our premature hymns of victory over this sin 
or that are changed into confessions of a shameful defeat, 
and we, who went forth with victorious garlands too early 
wreathed about our brows, have to come home and put ashes 
upon our heads, how must it have been with them ? how 
continually must it have been a seeing of the better only 
with a greater guilt to choose the worse ! Surely the con- 
fession of the Jewish Pharisee that was zealous for the law 
and for righteousness must have been the confession of un- 
numbered souls in all the world, wrung out from a deep 
heart-agony, from the sense of defeats repeating themselves 
with a sad uniformity, of ever deeper entanglement in the 
defilements of the flesh and of the world — " That which I 
do, I allow not; for what I would, that do I not; but what 
I hate, that do I....I delight in the law of God after the in- 
ward man ; but I see another law in my members, warring 
against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity 
to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched 
man that I am ! who shall deliver me from the body of this 
death V: 

Such voices no doubt, did make themselves heard. For 
indeed we shall not err, if contemplating the times which 
went before the Incarnation, we affirm thart there had 
been two cries which had long been going up into the ears of 
the Lord of Hosts — two cries, although one was far more 
distinct and articulate than the other. There was the voice 
of appointed prophets and seers, watchers on the moun- 
tains of Israel, waiting for a Sun of Righteousness, who 



THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 219 

as they surely knew, should in his time scatter the world's 
gloom and shed healing from his wings. There was 
their voice who knowing this, would yet ; out of a mighty 
sense of the present evil around them and within them, 
have fain hastened the time, — psalmist and prophet who ex- 
claimed, " Oh that the salvation were given unto Israel out 
of Zion I" " Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens and 
come down 1" But there was another, a more confused cry 
of multitudinous tones : it oftentimes knew not what its 
own accents meant; it was often rather a groan within the 
bosom of huumanity, which asked not, and thought not of a 
listener, than a voice sent up unto heaven. It was a cry 
which only infinite wisdom and infinite love would have inter- 
preted into that cry for heavenly help, which indeed at the 
heart it was ; a cry needing infinite love to pardon all in it 
which made it rather a cry against God than to him. But that 
love it found. He who said long before, "I have seen, I have 
seen the affliction of my people/' saw also the affliction of a 
world hopelessly out of the way, translated its confused voices 
into an appeal unto Himself, and sent forth his Son to be 
Saviour of the lost. 

And then, what not alone the Law could not do, in that it 
was weak through the flesh, but what all wisdom had been 
equally impotent to effect, for it underlay the same weakness, 
He did; what they could not give, he gave. For here we come 
back again to a point which I have pressed already, 
but which yet is so important, that I shall make no apology, 
for pressing it once more, which is this, — that the prero- 
gative of our Christian faith, the secret of its strength, is that 
all which it has, and all which it offers, is laid up in a person. 
This is what has made it strong, while so much else has 
proved weak, that it has a Christ at its middle point — that 
it is not a circumference without a centre, — that it has not 
merely a deliverance, but a Deliverer, — not a redemption 
only, but a Redeemer as well. This is what makes it fit for 



220 LECTURE VI. 

wayfaring men; this is what makes it sun-light, and all else 
compared with if but as moon-light, — fair it may be, but 
cold and ineffectual; while here the light and the life 
are one; the Light is also the Life of men. Oh how great 
the difference between submitting ourselves to a complex of 
rules and casting ourselves upon a beating heart; between 
accepting a system and cleaving to a person. And how 
tenfold blessed the advantages of the last, if that person is 
such a One that there shall be nothing servile in the entire 
resignation of ourselves to be taught of Him, for He is the 
absolute Truth — nothing unmanly in the yielding of our 
whole being to be wholly moulded by Him, for that is not 
merely the highest which humanity has reached, but the 
highest which it can reach — its intended and ideal perfection, 
at once its perfect image and superior Lord. 

They felt this, that help must lie in a person, that only 
round a person souls would cluster, — those who when they 
would fain make a final stand for the old beliefs of the world 
and pyove if these could not even now be quickened to dis- 
pute the world with the youthful Christian Church; — they 
felt, I say, this, who set about marshaling, not merely 
rival doctrines to the Christian, but rival benefactors to 
Christ. If He went about Judaea doing good, they also 
would point to sages of their own, who traveled on like 
errands to the furthest East. This is, no doubt the meaning 
of that half-fabulous life of Appollonius, which just as 
Christianity was rising into notice and evident significance, 
made its appearance ; — this the explanation of that revived 
interest in Pythagoras, which then found place. The vo- 
taries of the old religions felt that in this respect they must 
not come short of that which they would oppose; and 
rightly — however weak and flitting and unreal the phantoms 
which they conjured up to their help. 

For, brethren, had we a system only, it would leave us 
just as weak as other systems have left their votaries. We 



THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 221 

should have to confess that we found in ours, as they found in 
theirs, no adequate strength — that not merely now and then, 
and at ever rarer intervals, we were worsted in our conflict 
with the sin of our own hearts, but evermore. Our blessed- 
ness, and let us not miss that blessedness, is, that our trea- 
sures are treasured in a person, and are therefore inex- 
haustible — in one who requires nothing but what first He 
gives — who is not for one generation a present teacher and 
a living Lord, and then for all succeeding a past and a dead 
one, but who is present and living for all — as truly for us 
in this latter day, as for them who went up and down with 
him in the days of his flesh. Our strength and our bless- 
edness is, that what we have to know is " the truth as it is 
in Jesus j" that what we have to learn, is to u learn Christ; 77 
that what we have to put on, is to "put on the Lord Jesus 
Christ/ 7 and the righteousness which is by Him. 



19* 



LECTURE VII. 

THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 

Hebrews xi. 10. 

A city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. 

We have seen the manner in which He who was " the 
Desire of all nations/' met and satisfied the yearnings of men 
for an inward peacemaker, for one who, by the mighty magic 
of his word and Spirit, should change the tumult of man's soul 
into a great calm; who should heal the hurts which each man 
was conscious that he had inflicted upon himself; who should 
set each man free from the bondage to those lords many, 
his own lusts and inordinate affections, under whose cruel 
tyranny he had come. But besides these longings for har- 
mony and health and freedom in the region of his own*inner 
life, there are other longings and other desires which crave 
satisfaction. For each, besides being simply a man, is also 
a man among men : besides the sinful element which so per- 
plexes bis own inner life, in the relation of one part of it to 
the other, of the higher to the lower, which so threatens his 
true life with destruction, not from foreign, but from intestine, 
enemies — the same sinful element acting outwardly in him- 
self, and in every other man, disturbs and perplexes his rela- 
tion to them, and theirs to him. That which remains in 
himself, unsubdued, of evil, that which exists of the same in 
every other man, brings about a collision between two self- 
ishnesses. " From whence" — in the wonderfully simple, 
yet profound language of Scripture, language applicable to 
the pettiest village brawl, and to the mightiest conflict that 
has ranged one half of the world against the other — " from 
(222) 



THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 223 

whence come wars and fightings among you ? come they 
not hence, even of the lusts that war in your members V 1 
(Jam. iv. 1.) 

At once the question has presented itself to every thought- 
ful man — it eminently did so to the great spirits of anti- 
quity, — Is the warfare of these encountering selfishnesses 
the necessary, the only condition of society? Is it our 
wisdom to acquiesce in it, satisfied if this evil will allow 
itself to be kept within certain bounds — to be so far re- 
strained, that a society, a living together of men for 
social conveniences unattainable in their isolated state, be- 
comes possible ? And is society such a fellowship of men 
that have holden back, by mutual consent, so much of their 
selfishness and evil, as would render habitation within the 
same walls or in the same neighbourhood impossible, and 
would thus defeat them of the gains which they desired by 
this combination to attain ? 

There have never been wanting, — there were not wanting 
of old, — those who dared to avow this wolfish theory of 
society for their own — that is, as a theory : for no commu- 
nity of men has ever subsisted .upon it; no sooner have they 
attempted to put it in practice, than, biting and devouring, 
they have presently been utterly consumed one of another. 
And they who even avowed it as a theory were few — a pro- 
fligate sophist of the old or the new world, a Thrasymachus* 
or a Mandeville;f the exceptions and not the rule. For 
rather it was truly seen that the fellowship of man with man, 
so far from being an artificial product of his wants, something 
added on to his true humanity, that lay circular and complete 
in himself already; something therefore which he might have 
forgone without any necessary imperfection, — is that rather 
which constitutes the very humanity itself — animals herding, 
men only living, together. It was seen that this fellowship 
is the sphere in which alone his true life, that which belongs 

* Plato's Republic. f Fable of the Bees. 



224 LECTURE VII. 

to him as man, can unfold itself — *in which alone he can 
reach, it is little to say, the perfection of his being, but 
without which he cannot be conceived otherwise than as a 
monster, such a monster as the world never saw. It was 
truly perceived of that other condition of absolute isolation, 
that so far from being the state of nature, it is rather a state 
so unnatural that no man has ever perfectly reached it — the 
most absolute savage not having become an isolated unit, 
not having been able to strip himself bare of all moral rela- 
tions — being at most able to act as though he had not, but 
never able to cease from having these. And they under- 
stood therefore that not this tamed selfishness was the idea in 
which the state consisted, and on which it reposed, but that 
there was another to which every state and fellowship of 
men, as it deserved the name, as it would be any thing bet- 
ter than a pirate's deck or a robber's den, must be a nearer 
or more remote approximation : a condition in which men 
were holden together by invisible ties, — by sanctions which 
not the flesh, but the spirit owned to be binding — by com- 
mon rites, — by sanctities which men dared not neglect, — 
fby a god Terminus keeping the boundaries of fields, — by a 
dread of vengeance, not as the mere human recoil of out- 
rage on the wrong-doer, but as being itself divine, — a condi- 
tion in which men have felt that they were one people, not 
so much in their common interests and common aims, or 
even in their common history and descent and language, as 
in the one tutelar deity that overlooked their city, and to 
whom they had confided its keeping. 

If it was so — if there was this sense existing in the hearts, 
showing itself in the acts, of men, that the relations between 
man and man rest on something out of sight, are spiritual 

* As is remarkably witnessed in the words, civilized, civilization. 
The civilized man, as contradistinguished from the savage or utterly 
degenerate man, is essentially the civis, belongs to a civitas. 

f Sophocles, Antigone, 450 — 400. 



THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 225 

relations, not those of force, or fraud, or convenience — that 
men do not huddle together as cattle, to keep themselves 
warm, nor band together as wild beasts, that they may hunt 
in company • that law is not a result of so much self-will 
which each man might have kept, yet for certain advan- 
tageous considerations throws into a common stock, but that 
rather there is a law of laws, anterior to, and constituting 
the ground of, each positive enactment — if men had any 
sense of this divine order, which they did not themselves 
constitute, but into which they entered; which to accept 
was good, which to deny and fight against was evil, — if they 
did thus believe in a kingdom of righteousness and truth, 
and that we were ordained for that, (in the words of the 
father of Roman philosophy, Nos ad justitiam esse natos,) — 
if there was any true feeling that those lusts and desires, so 
far from being the ground of the state, the cement which 
held it together, were rather the element of decay which was 
ever threatening its dissolution, and were to be denied as the 
violations of the humanity, not recognized as its essentials ; 
then we have implicitly here the acknowledgment of, and 
the yearning after, the kingdom of God.* They who be- 

* Thus Cicero (JDe Legg.,) 1. 1, c. 7 :) Universus hie mundus una 
ci vitas communis Deorum atque hominum existimanda. Cf. Be Fin. 
1. 5, c. 23, and the glorious passage in Juvenal, (Sat. 15, 131 — 158,) 
one of the noblest in antiquity on the fellowship of men with one 
another, as resting on their divine original. I may be excused for 
quoting a few lines : 

Separat hoc nos 
A grege mutorum, atque ideo venerabile soli 
Sortiti ingenium, divinorumque capaces, 
Atque exercendis capiendisque artibus apti 
Sensum a ccelesti demissum traximus arce, 
Cujus egent prona et terrain spectantia. Mundi 
Principio indulsit communis conditor illis 
Tantum animas, nobis animum quoque ; mutuus ut nos 
Affectus petere auxilium, et prsestare juberet, 
* Dispersos trahere in populum, migrare vetusto 



226 LECTURE VII. 

lieved this, believed in " the city which hath foundations." 
in that only one which can have everlasting foundations, for 
it is the only one whose foundations are laid in perfect, 
righteousness and perfect truth — the city " whose builder 
and maker is God/' which Abraham looked for, and because 
he looked for, would take no portion in the cities of confu- 
sion round him, but dwelling in tents witnessed against 
them, and declared plainly that he sought a country — the city 
of which we already are made free, and which it was given 
to the latest seer of the New Covenant, ere the book was 
sealed, to behold in the spirit coming down from heaven in 
its final glory. (Rev. xxi. 2.) 

And can we say that there were not such thoughts and 
expectations stirring in the hearts of men — that the idea of 
a perfect state, as well as of a perfect man, had not risen up 
before the eyes of them, the men of desire, the souls to 
which any spirit of higher divination was imparted ? Were 
not the latest speculations of the wisest sage, those to which 
he fitly came after he had accomplished each other task, 
concerning this very thing? Nor needs it to press that 
derivation of religion which would make it the band and 
bond, which binding men to Grod, binds them also to one 
another; for it is a derivation at the least questionable j* 

De nemore, et proavis habitatas linquere silvas ; 

JEdificare domos, laribus conjungere nostris 

Tectum aliud, tutos vicino limine somnos 

TJt collata daret fiducia ; protegere armis 

Lapsum, aut ingenti nutantem vulnere civem ; 

Communi dare signa tuba, defendier iisdem 

Turribus, atque una. portarum clave teneri. 
* Nitzsch (Theol. Stud. u. Krit. v. 1, p. 532) seeks elaborately to 
prove that, according to the genius of the Latin language, the only 
possible derivation of religio is Cicero's (Be Nat. Deor., 1. 2, c. 28:) 
Qui omnia, quae ad cultum Deorum pertinerent, diligenter retracta- 
rent et tanguam relegerent, sunt dicti religiosi ex relegendo. It will 
thus have for its first meaning, the conscientious anxiety and ?.ecu- 



THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 227 

and the fact, to which such an etymology would give only 
an additional proof, is unquestionable without it — I mean, 
that the invisible ties were those in which every state was 
acknowledged to consist, so that with their weakening it must 
grow weak, with their perishing it must perish j while to 
strengthen and to multiply these, was justly regarded as the 
noblest mission of its noblest sons. What if here too hea- 
thendom had but the negative preparation, and Judaism the 
positive? what if the Jew could point to a state which did 
realize, though through his own sin most inadequately, this 
kingdom in its unripe and early beginnings, and if he was 
upheld by the sure word of prophecy, that one day the King 
of this kingdom should be revealed, and should reign in 
righteousness; while for the heathen they were for the most 
part dreams to which he could impart no reality, realities 
which tarried infinitely farther behind the idea which they 
professed to embody — this was only according to the distri- 
bution, in God's manifold wisdom, of their several parts to 

racy in the performances of the divine offices. The passage which 
best explains how the the word obtains a wider meaning is this 
from Arnobius, (Adv.. Gen. 1. 4, c. 30 :) Non enim qui solicite religii 
et immaculatas hostias credit . . . numina consentiendus est colere, 
aut officia solus religionis implere. This etymology was called in 
question by Lactantius, who derives the word not from relegere, but 
religare, to which derivation allusion is made in the text. He says 
(Inst. Div., 1. 4, c. 24:) Hoc vinculo pietatis obstricti Deo et religati 
sumus, unde ipsa religio nomen accepit ; et non ut Cicero interpre- 
tatus est, a relegenclo. He has Lucretius on his side, to whose 
words he alludes : 

arctis 
Religionum animos nodis exsolvere pergo. 
Augustine, too, who at first had consented to Cicero's etymology, 
inclines at a later period (Retract., 1. 1, c. 13) in favour of the other. 
Freund (Lat. Wortarbuch, s. v.) without expressing himself at all 
so strongly as Nitzsch has done in regard of the absolute inadmissi- 
bility of the other derivation, yet accepts as certainly preferable 
the Ciceronian. 



228 LECTURE VII. 

Jew and Gentile, in the preparation for Christ's coming; to 
the one being already given the stamina and rudiments of 
that which afterwards should unfold itself more fully, to the 
other being given little more than the expectation and the 
want — yet both so conspiring to prepare the way for his 
appearing. 

This want and this expectation Christ came to satisfy ; for 
He came not merely to awaken a religious sentiment in the 
minds and hearts of his disciples, or to declare to them cer- 
tain doctrines of which before they were ignorant; but to 
found a kingdom, as He himself declared from the first ; as 
St. John, the herald of his coming, had declared before 
Him; "'The kingdom of God is at hand;" "The kingdom 
of God is among you." For this term, " kingdom of 
God," we must not impoverish as though it were merely 
a convenient abstraction to express the sum total of the reli- 
gious sentiments, opinions, feelings, actions of his disci- 
ples. But this kingdom, as it is a kingdom, points to a 
visible fellowship, and the embodiment therein of a number 
of persons, constituting an organic whole, owning a single 
head. And as it is a kingdom of God, it declares God to 
be its author and its founder ; it declares itself to be lifted 
above the caprice of men, neither having been made, nor yet 
being to be marred, by them; which they indeed may 
deny, but which cannot deny itself, nor by their denial be 
annulled. 

The practical Roman saw as much as the natural man 
could see of this in a moment — that the question at issue 
between Christ and the world was not a question of one 
notion and another, but of one kingdom and another; and 
seeing, he came at once to the point, " Art Thou a king, 
then ?" And that empire which tolerated all other religions, 
would have tolerated the Christian, instead of engaging in a 
death-struggle with it, to strangle or be strangled by it, but 
that it instinctively felt that this, however its first seat and 



THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 229 

home might seem to be in the hearts of men, yet could not 
remain there, but would demand an outward expression for 
itself — must go forth into the world, and conquer a domin- 
ion of its own — a dominion which would leave no room in 
the world for another fabric of force and fraud ! for it was 
his dominion who, sitting on his throne, should scatter away 
all evil with his eyes; who had said in a thousand ways, 
" All the horns of the ungodly will I break, but the horns 
of the righteous shall be exalted. " 

It is quite true that this kingdom, in the men who at any 
time compose it, may misunderstand and mistake itself, even 
as it has often done. There are times when it caricatures 
itself into a popedom, when knowing rightly that it ought to 
have a real and outward existence, yet it will not believe 
that it has this, or is a kingdom at all, unless it can outdo 
the kingdoms of the world on their own ground, and in their 
own fashion ; unless it can be a kingdom like unto them, 
and greater than they in their kind of power and mag- 
nificence and glory. It is quite true that times arrive 
when it cannot believe in its own oneness unless it can 
see that oneness represented to it in a visible Head. Yet 
this only proves that times may arrive, when, through 
the sin of its members, its consciousness of itself as God's 
Church grows weak, when it has only too much lost hold 
of the great truths on which it was founded, and which it 
was intended to proclaim ; and having done so, does, by 
an inevitable necessity, act over again the unfaithful re- 
quest of the children of Israel, when they desired a king 
to go forth with their armies, as one went forth with 
the armies of the nations, and would not believe, unless 
they could thus see him there, that "the shout of a king 
was among them." (1 Sam. viii.) And the reaction from 
this error must not make us to count that this kingdom can 
only be spiritual when it ceases to be real, when retiring 
into the hearts of men, and dwelling there apart, it claims 

20 



230 LECTURE VII. 

no more the world for its possession, and each region and 
province of man's actual life for its own. 

But to return. This kingdom, as it was a consummation 
of all that men had ever hoped in the way of a kingdom of 
righteousness, as it was a protest and witness against the 
evil into which each kingdom of the world, each fairest 
polity of man's founding, was ever presently degenerating, 
was not all. Christ came to give more than this ; to give 
not merely a kingdom of truth for some men, but for every 
man ; to found a fellowship which should be for men as men, 
which should leave out none, which should call no man 
common or unclean. This indeed was new, not merely in fact, 
but even in theory ; for it had hardly risen over the horizon 
of their minds who stood in wisdom and in goodness upon 
the mountain-summits of the world. The Greek ever left 
out the barbarian; the freeman, the slave; the philosopher, 
the simple. The highest culture of some was ever built 
upon the sacrifice of others ; they were pitilessly used up in 
the process. So far from men themselves producing the 
thought of a universal spiritual fellowship, even after it was 
given, they were long in making it their own. Thus Celsus 
mocks at the madness of the Gospel, (for so to him it 
showed,) — adduces as enough to convince its author of a 
shallow impracticable enthusiasm, that he should have pro- 
posed such a dream as this, that Greeks, and Barbarians, 
and Lybians, and all men to the ends of the earth, should 
be united in the reception of one and the same doctrine. 

Nor can we greatly wonder : the sense of diversity was 
so strong, that which was differencing men was so mighty, 
the intellectual superiority of the Greek over the Barbarian 
was so immense, that we cannot be so much surprised to 
find one thus mockiug at the scheme for bringing all men 
into one, as the shallow dream of an enthusiast's brain. 
Such it must have seemed to him, who had not insight 
enough to perceive that the real ground of separation be- 



TIIE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 231 

tween men lay, not in natural distinctions of race, of cus- 
toms, of language, but in different objects of worship, in the 
gods many of polytheism. These were what kept men apart, 
and rendered their union and communion impossible. They 
were not at one in the highest matter of their lives : how 
should they be in the lower ? And if this was the ground 
of division, then the walls of partition might yet be thrown 
down, would indeed fall away of their own selves, when 
once there was revealed to faith one God and Father of all, 
— one Christ, a common object of love and adoration for all, 
in whom the affections of all might centre, — one Spirit 
effectually working in all. Then indeed the Babel mis- 
chief, the confusion of spirits, whereof the confusion of 
tongues was only the outward sign, would cease ; even as 
for one prophetic moment on the day of Pentecost, in the gift 
of tongues, it had ceased,* in sign that the Church which 
that day was founded was for all nations and tongues and 
tribes. The distinctions between men were indeed infinite, 
reaching far down into the deeps of their being, yet not to 
that being's centre ; and in the regeneration, in that mighty 
act of God's which does not obliterate distinctions, but 
reconciles them in a higher unity, they might all, so far as 
they were elements of separation, be annulled. When to 
all alike it was permitted to say, " We are Christ's, and 
Christ is God's," then the secret of a fellowship was im- 
parted, which should include all nations, in which there 
should be neither wise nor simple, Greek nor Barbarian, 
bond nor free, but Christ should be all in all. 

Of all this the world had, beforehand, scarcely,the faintest 
intimations — the poorest parodies. Yet parodies perchance 

* Grotius; Poeno linguarum dispersit homines (Gen. xi.,) donuni 
linguarum dispersos in unum populum recollegit. In the Persian 
religion there was the expectation of a day coming when, with the 
abolition of all evil, eva j3t'ov xai fitav rto'Kvtevav avOpurtav fiaxapiav 
xal ofioyXuHjaoiv artdvtcoi' yfvsaOcu. (Plutarch, Dels, et Osir., c. 47.) 



232 LECTURE VII. 

there were; and we may be allowed to trace dim indistinct 
yearnings even for this, for the breaking down of the middle 
wall of partition, for the making of twain one new man. 
Thus there were already in the centuries anterior to our Lord 
meeting-places for the Greek and Jew. Remarkable in this 
respect was the existence of such a city as Alexandria, where 
the Jew and Greek met, and sought to exchange to mutual 
profit the most precious commodities each of his own intel- 
lectual and spiritual land, the Jew making himself acquainted 
with Greek culture, the Old Testament Scriptures becoming 
accessible to Greek readers. Yet still these meetings were 
intellectual only : no true blending did or could have fol- 
lowed from them. It is the fire of charity which must melt, 
ere there can be any real moulding into one. In vain had 
the whole East and West jostled violently together; they 
had hardly mingled any more for this. A certain surface 
civilization had ensued, which was common to both ; but 
hearts waited for more prevailing bands than those which 
even an Alexander could weave, ere they would knit them- 
selves together in one. And as far as any practical realiza- 
tion of the hopes which at any time the world cherished 
from this it now was further off than ever. The iron king- 
dom, the fourth beast, dreadful and terrible and strong 
exceedingly, had broken all other, and was stamping the 
residue under its feet; until it seemed now as if brutal force 
was all that remained, or that had a meaning any more, and as 
if the world only could be prevented from falling into pieces 
by those links and bands of iron, which were forged 
around it. 

But how hateful such a world was to live in, how intense 
a loathing it inspired in each nobler spirit, the works of 
Tacitus seemed preserved to us especially to tell. For 
surely this is the key-note of them, the predominant 
thought, — this indignation and scorn, which all words, 
even his own, seem weak to him to utter, at the sight of the 



THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 233 

high places of the earth, the seats of blessing, the thrones 
of beneficent power, occupied by the meanest and basest of 
their kind, — till we feel, as we read, this conviction to have 
been branded as with burning iron on his soul, that it were 
better ten thousand times not to be, than to witness the 
things which he has witnessed, and to bear the things which 
he has borne.* Nor on his soul only was the conviction 
branded, but on those, we cannot doubt, of multitudes be- 
side, whose more dumb agony found only its adequate 
expression in his words. 

But these failures, these shipwrecks of the world's hopes, 
these issues of things so different from the promise with 
which they started, this agony, this despair, they were not 
for nothing. They were part of that severe discipline of 
love to which the world was being submitted : they helped 
to constitute that fulness of time in which the Son of God 
should come, and coming, find acceptance. Not till the 
world's pride and self-confidence were thoroughly broken, 
would it have been prepared to bumble itself under his cross, 
would it have accepted that cross for the standard round 
which it rallied. For the breaking of this pride two great 
experiments had been going forward at the same time, had 
run through, as they gave a moral meaning to, all the ante- 
rior history of the world — experiments which needed both 
to be thoroughly and fairly tried. Of the Jewish it con- 
cerns us not here to speak at large : it was this, if righteous- 
ness could come by the law ; if there was a law which could 
give life — an external rule of conduct, even though of divine 
appointment, which could sanctify and save — if there was 
not a weakness and falseness in man, which would defeat 
and frustrate it all. This was most needful, and only 
through the process of this could a Saul ever have been 
transformed into a Paul. 

* Agricola, c. 2, 3, 45. 
20* 



234 LECTURE VI. 

But the other, which may not seem to us so directly of 
God's ordaining, yet was so indeed : for it was of its very 
essence that He should not mingle in it so far, should seem 
to have less to do with it ; — that those to whom it was given 
to try it out should walk in their own ways, and be left to 
their own resources. The experiment was this, whether man 
could unfold his own well-being out of himself — whether 
art or philosophy or institutions could give it to him ; whe- 
ther in any of these he could truly find himself and the good 
for which he was made. And of this experiment we cannot 
say that it was unfairly tried, or imperfectly worked out. 
All which was required for its success was there, and had 
been given in largest measure. God had raised up men of 
the most glorious gifts, of the mightiest strength of will ; 
and surely had deliverance lain in aught which man could 
unfold, by his own strength, out of his own being, the world 
had been indeed redeemed, and had found the fountain of 
salvation in itself. 

But fair and flattering, full of the promise of success, as 
the results showed oftentimes for a while, there was ever a 
worm at the root of this glory of the world. The moment 
of highest perfection was evermore the moment of commenc- 
ing decay. How deeply tragic, though in different ways, 
the histories of the Greek and Roman world ! how had the 
paths of glory led one and the other, though by diverse 
ways, to the grave of all their moral and spiritual independ- 
ence ; the intellectual conquests of the one and the worldly 
triumphs of the other, however diverse, yet having agreed 
in this, that they alike left the victors enslaved, degraded, 
and debased — the Greek a scorn to the Roman,* and the 
Roman to himself. And now the fresh creative energy of 
an earlier time had all departed and disappeared ; and that 
springing hope, which contemplated its objects, if not as 

* See such passages as Cicero Pro Flacco, c. 4; Juvenal, Sat. 3, 
58—113: 10, 174. 



THE REDEEMER FROM SIN. 235 

attained, yet at least as attainable, was no more. The world 
had outlived itself and its attractions — *saddest of all, had 
outlived even its hopes; the very springs of those hopes 
seemed to be dried up for ever. Yet was not this all with- 
out its purpose and its blessing. It was something to be 
shut into the one remedy, all other devices having failed, — 
to have come thus to the husks; for this alone would have 
sent back the prodigal of heathenism to claim anew his share 
in the rich provision of his father's house. This was the 
emptiness, of which Christ's coming should be the answer- 
ing fulness. In all this agony, this mighty yearning of 
souls, the gates of the world were being made high and lifted 
up, that the King of Grlory might come in. Only in such 
an utter despair, in such a sense of decrepitude, of death 
already begun, would the world have welcomed aright the 
Prince of Life, who came to make all things young, and out 
of the wreck and fragments of an old and decaying world, 
to build up a fairer and a new. 

And such he built up indeed. " They went astray in the 
wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in : 
hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. So they 
cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them 
from their distress. He led them forth by the right way, 
that they might go to a city of habitation." And this city 
of habitation, this kingdom, was all which they had asked 
for, or could ask. It was a/ree fellowship, the constraining 
bands of it being bands of love and not of force ; and He 
that founded it fulfilling the idea of the true spiritual con- 
queror of men, who should subdue all hearts, not by force or 
by flattery, but by the mighty magic of love — as some of old 
had been reaching out after this, when they dreamed of 
Osiris, that he went forth to conquer the world, not with 
chariots and with horses, but with music } for so had they 

* Augustine : Mundus tanta rerum labe contritus, ut etiam spe- 
ciem seductionis amiserit. 



236 LECTURE VII. 

felt that the power which truly wins must be a spiritual one, 
an appeal to the latent harmonies in every man — that in a 
kingdom of heaven law must be swallowed up in love, — not 
repealed, but glorified and transfigured, , its hard outline 
scarcely visible any more in the blaze of light with which it 
is surrounded. 

It was a large fellowship — larger than the largest which 
the heart of man had conceived; for it should leave out 
none, it should trample upon none : He that was its Head 
should " be favourable to the simple and needy, and preserve 
the souls of the poor." Nay, it should be larger than this, 
for it should embrace heaven and earth. That whereof the 
great Italian sage had caught a glimpse, that $ata* that 
amity or reconciliation of all things, whether they be things 
in heaven or things on earth, had found its fulfilment. 
Henceforward heaven and earth, angels and men, consti- 
tuted one kingdom, " his body, the fulness of Him that fill- 
eth all in all." 

It was a righteous fellowship. If aught of unrighteous- 
ness was within it, it was there only as a contradiction to 
the law of that kingdom, and presently to be separated off; 
even as all of unrighteous that was against it was in due 
time to be taken out of the way ; for it in its weakness was 
yet stronger than the strongest. It was only weak as the 
staff of Moses was weak ; which being one, and an instru- 
ment of peace, did yet break in shivers all weapons of war, 
the ten thousand spears of Pharaoh and his armies. 

And being this righteous kingdom it was also an eternal 
kingdom, having in it no seeds of decay, a kingdom not to 
be moved, which should endure as long as the sun and moon 
endureth, of the increase of which there should be no end. 

*Porphyrius (De Vita Pythag.:) q> L %l av (xaWSstfs) rtdvtiov rfpo? 
artcwraj, srte ®euv Ttpoj aA/dpu>7tov$ — sits doy/xdtuv rtpoj aXX^Xa 
— sits 6w9pt->7ti»v rfpos oXkYfkovs. See Baur's Apollonius von Tyana 
und Christus, p. 194. 



THE FOUNDER OF A KINGDOM. 237 

To this city, brethren, ye are come — the city of which 
such glorious things are spoken, the city of our God. Not 
only prophet and king of Israel, but sage and seer of every 
land, have desired to see the things which we see, and have 
not seen them — so truly are they the best things which man 
can conceive, or God can give. And what do they require 
of us but a walk corresponding ? Citizens of no mean city, 
whose citizenship is in heaven, we must not show ourselves 
unworthy of so high an honour. It is the very aggravation 
of the sinner's sin that he deals frowardly in the land of 
uprightness ; and because he does so it is declared that he 
shall not see the majesty of the Lord. (Isai. xxvi. 10.) We 
baptized men are in this "land of uprightness," in this 
kingdom of the trnth. For it is not that we shall come, but 
in the sure word of Scripture, we are come to Mount Zion, 
the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to 
all the glorious company which is there. 

And surely the apostle's argument which he drew from 
this ought to stand strong for us, his exhortation to find 
place in our hearts ; " Wherefore we receiving a kingdom 
which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may 
serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear." 
(Heb. xii. 28.) 



LECTURE VIIL 

CONCLUDING LECTURE. 

1 Thessalonians V. 21 

Prove all things ; holdfast that which is good. 

It needs not, I trust, to remind you, brethren, that in 
these lectures which are now concluding, we have been en- 
gaged in the seeking to discern the prophecy of Christianity, 
which has run through all history. I have traced in them, 
so far as under the conditions and limitations of such dis- 
courses I might, the manner in which the old world was in 
many ways blindly struggling to be that better thing which 
yet it never could truly be, except by the free grace and 
gift of God, — to come to that new birth, which yet it could 
not reach, until power for this mighty change was given it 
from on high. We have asked ourselves whether we could 
not discern an evident tending of men's thoughts and feel- 
ings and desires in one direction, and that direction the cross 
of Christ, a great spiritual under-current, which has been 
strongly and constantly setting that way ; so that his bring- 
ing forth of his kingdom into open manifestation, if in one 
sense a beginning, was in another, and in as true a sense, a 
crowning end. 

And it has cohered intimately with the purpose of these 
lectures, which, according to the purpose of their founder, 
should assume more or less of a defensive character, to urge 
the apology for our Christian faith which is here. It has 
been to me an argument for the truth and dignity of his 
mission who was its author, to find that in Him all fulness 
238 



CONCLUDING LECTURE. 239 

dwelt, all lines concentrated, all hopes of the world were ac- 
complished. For surely the King of Glory shows to us 
more glorious yet, when we are able to contemplate Him not 
merely as the Prophet and Priest and King of the Cove- 
nant but as the satisfier of vaguer, though not less real, 
aspirations, of more undefined longings, of more wide-spread 
hopes — when looking at Him, we take note with the inspired 
seer, that on his head are many crowns, — and looking at 
his doctrine, that not Israel only, but the isles also had waited 
for his law. 

This my subject I have now brought to a close; or at 
least I dare not, at this latest moment, open it upon another 
side. I may perhaps more profitably dedicate the present 
opportunity to the considering of some ways in which our 
recognition of the intimate relation between all that has gone 
before and all that now is between the hopes of the past and 
the fulfilments of the present, may practically and usefully 
influence our study of antiquity. For indeed a Christian 
view of the ancient world, which shall neither despise it, be- 
cause it is not what it could not be, itself Christian, because its 
grains of finer gold, of purer ore, are mixed with so much 
impure and debasing; nor yet on the other hand to glorify 
it, as though its imperfect anticipations of the truth were as 
good as or rendered superfluous, the manifestation of the 
perfect image of God in his Son, or its faint streaks of light 
were as truly an illumination as the day-spring from on 
high ; this true, it is most profitable for us that we should 
win. It may preserve us from extremes and exaggerations 
on either hand, into which we are in danger of running. 
It may preserve us, too, from a listless, careless, unfruit- 
ful study of that which, unless we neglect the plain duties 
that lie before us, must form one of the chief occupations of 
several, the most precious and least recoverable years of our 
lives, — years in which our minds are to be built up, if built 
up at all ; in which, more than in any other, our characters 



240 LECTURE VIII. 

are being moulded, and are receiving that impress which 
they shall bear to the end. 

The exaggerations to which I allude are twofold. There 
is that, first, against which one is almost unwilling to say 
a word, springing as it so often does, out of a state of mind in 
which there is so much that is admirable, — ■ giving witness 
for a moral earnestness, without which men would have been 
scarcely tempted to it; I mean the exggeration of those, 
who in a deep devotion to the truth, as it is a truth in Christ 
Jesus, count themselves bound by their alleigance to Him 
by his Name which they bear, his doctrine which they have 
learned, his Spirit which they have received, to take up a 
hostile attitude to every thing, not distinctly and avowedly 
Christian, as though any other bearing were a treason to his 
cause — a betrayal of his exclusive right to the authorship of 
all the good which is in the world. In this temper we may 
dwell only on the guilt and misery and defilements, the 
wounds and bruises and hurts, of the heathen world; or if 
aught better is brought under our eye, we may look askant 
and suspiciously upon it, as though all recognition of it were 
disparagement of something better. And so we may come to 
regard the fairest deeds of unbaptized men as only more 
showy sins. We may have a short but decisive formula with 
which to dismiss them : we may say, These deeds were not 
of faith, and therefore they could not please God. The men 
that wrought them knew not Christ, and therefore their work 
was worthless — hay, 'straw and stubble, to be utterly burned 
up in the day of trial of every man's work. 

Yet is it in truth a violation of the law of conscience, to 
use so sweeping a language as this. Our alleigance to Christ 
as the one fountain of light and life, demands that we affirm 
none to be good but Him — no goodness but that which has 
proceeded from Him : but it does not demand that we deny 
goodness, because of the place where we find it — because we 
find it a garden-tree in the wilderness ; but rather that 



CONCLUDING LECTURE. 241 

we claim it for Hiin, who was its true source and author, and 
whom it would itself have gladly owned as such, if, belonging 
to a happier time, it could have known Him. We do not 
make much of a light of nature, when we allow a righteous- 
ness in those, to whom in the days of their flesh the Gospel 
had not come ; we only affirm that the Word, though He had 
not yet dwelt among, yet being the light which lighteth every 
man that cometh into the world, had lighted them. Some 
glimpses of his beams, gilded their countenances, and gave 
to them whatever brightness they wore; and in recognizing 
this brightness, whatsoever it was, we are giving honour to 
Him, and not to them, glorifying the grace of God, and not 
the powers of man. 

I can well understand how, in the earnestness and exclu- 
siveness of a first love to Christ, and to that word of Holy 
Scripture which directly testifies of Him, all teaching of all 
other books, in which is no explicit mention of his name, 
should appear valueless to us; and all else taste flat and 
dull, because we taste not there the sweetness of that One 
Name which is sweeter than all. Yet were it good for us to 
see that, without going back one jot from this entire devot- 
edness to the Lord of our life, which everywhere looks for 
Him, and finds everything savourless without him — a 
devotedness too precious to be foregone, and for which no 
other gains would compensate — that without, I say, going 
back from this, we might yet enlarge the sphere of our Chris- 
tian sympathies, and take a wider range of objects v within 
it. To this end let us learn to cultivate a finer spiritual ear, 
and one which shall be more quick to catch the fainter echoes 
and whispers of his name, which are borne to us from other 
fields than those of Scripture ; let us learn to look for Him 
even where they thought not and could not have thought 
directly of Him, whose pages we may hold in our hand. 
Let us aim to take keener note of the manner in which all 
things pointed to Him, all things were asking for Him — the 
21 



242 LECTURE VIII. 

world passing judgment on itself,* and out of its own lips at 
once condemning itself and demanding its Redeemer, f de- 
manding him in frequent acknowledgments of the vanity of 
all things, in confessions of its own incurable evils,J in 
voices of deepest sadness and despair, — as theirs who by 
word or solemn rite declared plainly that it was better 
for man never to have been born than to live ; or, if he lived, 
that then the gods had no better boon for him than an early 
death — §and this not in the Christian sense of death as a 
passage into life, but only as the harbour from the world's 
wo, the anodyne of the world's pains. 

Let us take note, too, of the manner in which the language 
of philosopher and of poet seems often marvellously over- 

* Cicero (Tusc. Qucest., 1. 2, c. 22:) In quo viro erit perfecta 
sapientia, {quern adhuc nos quidem videmus neminem: sed philosopho- 
rum sententiis, qualis futuris sit, si modo aliquando fuerit, exponi- 
tur,) is igitur, &c. Compare Theogonis, 615, OvSiva 7ia.(x.7irfiriv 
ayaSov xal fistptov avdpa tov vvv av9pd>7tuv r t i%io$ xaSopa. — Even 
supposing a man were to reach the highest goodness, this could only 
be, as was confessed, through a long process of anterior mistake 
and error: he must be as a diamond which is polished in its own 
dust. Seneca (Be Clement, 1. 1, c. 6 :) Etiam si quis tarn bene pur- 
gavit animum, ut nihil obturbare eum amplius possit aut fall ere, 
ad innocentiam tamen peccando pervenit. 

f Seneca (Ep. 52.) Nemo per se satis valet ut emergat: oportet 
manum aliquis p or rig at; aliquis educat. 

% Thucjdides, 1. 3, c. 45 ; Seneca, De Ira, 1. 2, c. 8. 

\ Compare the remarkable fragment of Euripides, quoted in the 
original by Clemens of Alexandria (Strom., 1. 3, c. 3,) and in a Latin 
translation by Cicero, (Tusc. Bisp., 1. 1, c. 48.) 

E8so ydp ^uttj, avJJMyov Tioiov/Jihovs, 
Tov fyvvta dpqvslv, ft? oa' sp%s?ai xaxd' 
Tov 6 av Oavovta xai 7tbva>v 7t£7ia.vfi£vov 
Xaipoj'T'aj, £vq>r]/j.ovv-tcis$ ixTtiurtzLV bojxtiv. 

Compare Herodotus, 1. 5, c. 4; Pliny, H. N., 1. 7, c. 1 and c. 41. 
Si verum facere judicium volumus, ac repudiate omni fortunae am- 
bitione decernere, mortalium nemo est felix ; Pindar, Pyth., 8, 131. 



CONCLUDING LECTURE. 243 

ruled to have a deeper significance, to bear the burden of a 
larger and completer thought, than it is possible that they 
who uttered it could have had in their mind, or could have 
attached to their words. As for instance, when it is said* 
that the highest righteousness must be approved in ex- 
tremest trial, that if we would know certainly whether one be 
indeed a lover of the good, he must be set in those condi- 
tions, in which to abide by the good shall bring upon him 
every outward calamity, shame and loss and scorn and tor- 
ture and death, all which he might have avoided would he 
ever so little have gone back from that good ; the righteous- 
ness which he chooses must be stripped utterly bare of every 
ornament, yea, must seem to the world as the extremest 
unrighteousness, and then only it will be seen whether he 
loves it for its own sake — to us Christians shall not this pos- 
sible case at once present itself as an actual one ? Shall we 
not catch here, as many indeed have caught, - ]" a prophetic 
word about the cross, and about Him who even in this way 
was proved, by ignominy and scorn and suffering and death, 
whether he would love the good and hate the evil; and who. 
did, by a distinct act of his will, choose for his portion that 
righteousness to which all these were linked, and which 
could only lead Him by roughest paths to the shamefullest 
and bitterest end ? Or when another expresses his convic- 
tion that a sacred Spirit dwells with man, yea, not with him 

* By Plato (De Repub. 1. 2, c. 4, 5.) I have not seen it noted 
how the reverse of the picture, the perfectly unrighteous man, 
whom Plato draws, is almost as remarkable a prophecy in its kind, 
of Antichrist, and of the deceitful glory which will surround him. 

f Grotius (De Verii. Eel. Christ., 1. 4, c. 12:) Etvero lsetius esse 
honestum, quoties magno sibi constat sapientissimi ipsorum dixere. 
Plato, De Republica 11 quasi prcescius, ait, ut vere Justus exhibeatur, 
opus esse ut virtus ejus omnibus ornamentis spolieter, ita ut ille 
habeatur ab aliis pro scelesto, illudatur, suspendatur denique, Et 
certe summae patientige exemplum ut exstaret, aliter obtineri non 
poterat. 



244 LECTURE VIII. 

only, but in him, a Spirit which is not his own, however 
freely it converses with him, a Spirit which treats him as he 
treats it.* shall we refuse to acknowledge here a word which 
was reaching out after that Spirit, the Spirit of the Father 
and the Son, which, dwelling in Grod, does also dwell in 
sanctified souls ; which, if we grieve, will grieve us, which, 
if we continue to provoke, will utterly forsake us ? And in 
many such ways as these we may disentangle the golden 
threads of a finer woof than its own, which were running 
through the whole tissue which the ancient world was weav- 
ing for itself; we may delightedly observe how the cross of 
Christ was as an invisible magnet, drawing hearts to itself 
by a mighty, though secret, attraction, in ages long before 
it was openly lifted up, an ensign for the nations. 

Let us remember too how little the world could have 
done without these preparations which sometimes we are 
tempted to despise. Difficult as was the world's reception 
of the word, and its transition to the faith, of Christ, how 
much more difficult would it have been if the way had not 
been thus prepared. What another thing would it have 
been, if the word about the Son of Grod, where it first was 
delivered, besides strengthening and purifying and enlarg- 
ing, had needed also to create, the very foundations of reli- 
gious belief and ethical science on which it rested; if it had 
been needful for it to be not merely the seed, but the soil, — 
having first to form the very ground in which it should 
itself afterwards find room and depth to germinate. If 
instead of finding a language ready at hand which it could 
appropriate, and needed only thus to rescue for itself, f if, 

* Seneca (Epist. 41 :) Sacer intra nos spiritus sedet, malorum bono- 
rumque nostrorum observator et custos ; hie prout a nobis tractatus 
est, itanos ipse tractat...Quernadmodum radii solis contingunt qui- 
dem terrain, sed ibi sunt unde mittuntur, sic animus magnus et 
sacer, et in hoc demissus ut propius divina nossemus, conversatur 
quidem nobiscum, sed hseret origini suae. 

-j- Thus not merely the more obvious, bat the more recondite rites 



CONCLUDING LECTURE. 24 

instead of this, all nobler words and signs, all which spoke 
of worship, of religion, of sanctity, of initiation, of atone- 
ment, of piety, had been absent from it, how different the 
case would have been. And with the absence of the things, 
there would also have been inevitably the absence of the 
words which are their correlatives j since language is no more 
than thought and feeling permanently fixing and embodying 
themselves \ it is but as the- pillars of Hercules, to mark 
how far the conquests of spirit have advanced. 

No one can have thoughtfully perused the modern records 
of missionary labour among savage tribes, and the almost 
insurmountable hindrances opposed to the reception of the 
G-ospel by languages, if they deserve the name, stripped of 
each nobler and deeper element, — languages in which is no 
speculation, no distinction, no hoarded thought, no embo- 
died morality, no unconscious wisdom, — no terms, in short, 
but for the barest needs or the vilest doings* of the animal 

of heathenism, have been made to set forth far better things than 
themselves. For example, the mysteries yield the substratum of lan- 
guage and imagery and allusion to each word of the following noble 
passage, in which Clement {Cohort, ad Gent., c. 12,) is exhorting the 
Gentiles to become pWac- of Christ : 'Q. t?iov aynov <1>j ahyjdus 
lAvGTliqpiW cj <J>wt , oj ax^pa-tov. 8q8ovxov/*cu, tov$ ovpavov$ xao tov 
®sov srtortifev 4 as aytoj ywo/xai, fivovfxsvo^ Izpoyavm 8e 6 Kuptoj, 
jcac 1ov /xvcU'rjv Cff^ayt^Wat, tyio toy coy cov' xac rtapxT? lQs tai t'co Ha^pc 
ifov 7i£7ti6i?£vxo'ta, aiuxSt typovfieiov. Taxi^a tcov sficov (ivtilripiov 
tiafiaxxsviAaTfa' el fiovhst, xao ov [xvov, xcu zopsvaeis pet' ayysXcov 
a/AtyL tov ayswqtov xai avooKsOpov xav fiovov ovttos ©eoy, csvvvu- 
vovvtos TJfJUV T?OV ®£OV Atfyou. 

* Languages like one of the North American Indian, which pos- 
sesses a word for a tomahawk, but none for God; or that of a tribe 
-in Australia, which with the same deficiency, has yet a word 
to describe the process by which an unborn child may be destroyed 
in its mother's womb. On all this subject of language rising and 
falling with the rise and fall of people's moral and spiritual life, and 
on the speech of savages as not being the primal rudiments, but 
21* 



246 LECTURE VIII. 

man, without feeling that a miserable necessity is imposed 
on the Truth when it must weave for itself the very gar- 
ments in which it shall array itself, and is in danger of los- 
ing its treasures in the very attempt to communicate them, 
— so wretched are the only channels through which it can 
convey them. And considering this, he will esteem it to 
have been an infinite mercy, yea a very primal necessity, 
that the Truth, where it uttered itself in that which should 
be its normal utterance for all future ages of the Church, 
where it first took body and shape, should have found, as 
regarded language, vessels ready prepared for its new wine, 
and only waiting for a higher consecration, — an inheritance 
which it had but to make its own, entering upon it, as the 
children of Israel entered upon vineyards which they had 
not planted, and wells which they had not digged, and 
houses which they had not built, of which yet they became 
the rightful possessors from henceforth. 

Nor can we doubt that by that, which we with our fuller 
knowledge, our larger grace, are inclined to slight, many 
were preserved from defilements, in which otherwise they 
had been inevitably entangled. This salt may have been 
powerless to give the savor of life to that with which it came 
in contact ; but that progress of corruption, that dissolution 
of social and personal life, which it was unable ultimately to 
arrest, it yet retarded for a time.* It preserved many a 

the ultimate wreck, of a language, there is much of deep interest in 
De Maistre's Soirees de St. Petersbourg, Deux. Entret. 

* The consideration of the Greek Philosophy as a 7tpo7tai8soa 
for the reception of the absolute Christian truth, is a more recur- 
ring one, and takes a more prominent plage, in the writing of the 
later Clement, than perhaps in those of any other teacher of the 
early Church. Thus he speaks of it in one place as a step to some- 
thing higher : (yTCofiaQpav oi>aav tf^j xata XpccTT'ov (Ju^offotjuas, 
Strom., 1. 6, c. 8.) Again, as a preparatory discipline, and ordained 
to be such by the providence of God: Qx tr^ deias rtpovoia^ Szdoa- 
Oai, 7tpo7taihtvovGo,v si; t^v 5ta ~Kptotov 't&ciuaiv, Strom., 1. 6, 



CONCLUDING LECTURE. 247 

man for something better than itself, and in not a few cases 
of which we have distinct record, handed over in due time 

c. 17;) and so again as an anterior culture of the soil of man's 
heart for receiving the seed of life: TtpoxaOcupfi xao rtposO^et tqv 
■\v%r\v dc, 7tapa8oxirjv rtiGtscos, (Strom., 1. 7, c. 3.) It would seem 
from more passages than one in his writings, that he felt it needful 
to defend himself for the so high appreciation in which he held the 
philosophy of Greece ; vjv tvvss Siafisfi'h'yixa'tLv, aXyjOt Las ovaav elxova 
ivapyrj 9eiav 8copsa v 'E?a.^ca bsho^svrjv. There were those who 
warned against its attractions, as being those of the "strange 
woman" of Prov. v. 3 — 8, " whose lips drop as a honeycomb, and 
her mouth is smoother than oil." (Strom., 1. 1, c. 5.) The heathen 
philosophers were according to them the "thieves and robbers" 
which " came before" Him who was the true Shepherd of men 
(Strom., 1. 1, c. 17.) Tertullian may be taken as a representative 
of the more intolerant view, (Apol., c. 46 :) Quid simite Philosophus 
et Christianus ? Grsecise discipulus et coeli ? famse negotiator et 
salutis? verb'orum, et factorum operator... interpolator erroris, et 
integrator veritatis ? furator ejus et custos? Whatever exaggera- 
tion there is in the language of Clement, yet this I think is certain, 
that his strong expressions have their rise in a deep and solemn 
feeling, that nothing anywhere which is good, by which men have 
been kept back from any evil, or prepared to any good, but must be 
traced up to God. He dared not trace it to any other; thus speak- 
ing of this very thing his words are, rtavtav fxsv yap attftoj tfcov 
xa%oov 6 ©so?. (Strom., 1. 1. c. 5.) And that he did not make the 
difference between the two a mere question of degree is plain from 
such expressions as these : Xcopt^tfat'^ ^VkiqvixTi aTi^tff ta t^s xad" 
7)[A,a$ si xal 'tov ow-tov jA-sts^^sv 6Vo i u.aT'oj, xal fisyiQsL yvditisas, 
xai drfoSftlet jcuptcoT'lpa, xal deiq* bvva^n, ' OsodiSax-tOL yap r\[m<^ 
(Strom., 1. 1, c. 20.) That other was the wild olive which had 
need, ere it bore any nobler fruit, of insertion upon the good 
(Strom., 1. 6, c. 15;) words which may suggest a comparison with 
that most eloquent passage at the end of the first book of Theodo- 
ret, Be Grcec. Affect. Curat. And those remarkable words have 
been often quoted in which Clement likens heretics and founders of 
human systems to the rabble rout that tore the body of Pentheus 
limb from limb : so they tore the truth, and then each boasted of 



248 LECTURE VIII. 

its votaries to the school of Christ. To mention but a sin- 
gle example. Few who have once read, will forget the man- 
ner in which the falling in with the ITortensius* of Cicero 
kindled the young Augustine, and inflamed him with a pas- 
sionate love of wisdom. What a moment it was in his life 
when he lighted on that treatise, how greatly did it serve to 
arrest him in that downward career which he was then too 
rapidly treading, to hinder him from utterly laying waste 
his moral life. How did it set him to the seeking for 
goodly pearls, though the goodliest of all, the pearl of great 
price, he was not yet to find ! He himself in after years 
describes all this, with thankful ascriptions of praise to the 
guiding hand of his G-od, and telling how that book, though 
it did not and could not bring him into the inmost sanc- 
tuary of the faith, yet was to him in the truest sense a 
porch to that auguster temple not made with hands, into 
which at a later day he should be privileged to enter ; and 
did at once hand him over to the searching of the Scrip- 
tures, though as yet his eyes were holden, and he found not 
in them till a later day their hid treasures of wisdom and 
of knowledge.f 

the fragment in his hands as though it were the whole (ixdotri 
brtsp £^a#£j/, wj rtucsav an>%ti <tv\v dtoyfoiav.) 

* Otherwise called De Philosophia. It has been lost, all but a 
few unimportant fragments. The subject was the superiority of 
philosophy to eloquence. 

•j- Con/., 1. 3, c. 4: Usitato jam descendi ordine perveneram in 
librum quemdam cujusdam Ciceronis, cujus linguam fere omnes 
mirantur, pectus non ita. Sed liber ille ipsius exhortationem conti- 
net ad philosophiam, et vocatur Hortensius. Ille vero liber mutavit 
affectum meum,...et vota ac desideria mea fecit alia. Viluit mihi 
repente omnis vana spes, et immortalitatem sapientse concupisce- 
bam 9estu cordis incredibili. 

He has very interesting acknowledgments (Cow/., 1. 7, c. 9, 20, 
21) of the effect which the Platonist books exerted upon him at the 
great crisis of his life that went before his conversion, — what he 



CONCLUDING LECTURE. 249 

But I spake of exaggerations on either side into which we 
were liable to fall. To take the very opposite extreme to 
this of painting the old world to ourselves in lines and 
colours of unredeemed blackness, we may dwell exclusively 
on the fairer side which it presents, shutting wilfully our 
eyes to each darker and more revolting spectacle which it 
displays. We may find in its art and its literature that 
which gratifies our taste, and out of a lack of any deeper 
moral wants, we may come to say with the poet, " Beauty 
is Truth, Truth Beauty," and where we find beauty and 
proportion and harmony, may be ready to pardon the ab- 
sence of every thing beside; just as those Italian literati at 
the revival of learning, who preferred calling themselves 
brethren in Plato to brethren in Christ, to whom the groves 
of Academus were far more than the waters of Siloam, and 
the cultivation of taste than the promotion of holiness — men 
who so moutned over the vacant thrones of Olympus, that 
to them a heaven opened, with angels ascending and descend- 
ing upon the Son of man, seemed but an insufficient com- 
pensation. 

But such a nearer acquaintance with the world which was 

found in them, and what he did not find, — where they helped, and 
where rather they hindered him: concluding with this declaration 
of the things which he had looked for there in vain: Hoc illse lit- 
terae non habent, Lacrymas Confessionis, Sacrificium tuum, Spiri- 
tum contribulatum, Cor. contritum et humiliatum, Populi salutem, 
Sponsam, Civitatem, Arrham Spiritus Sancti, Poculum pretii nostri. 
Nemo ibi contat: Nonne Deo subdita erit anima mea ? ab ipso enim 
salutaro meum: etenim ipse Deusmeus, et salutaris meus, susceptor 
meus, non movebor amplius. Nemo ibi audit vocantem: Venite ad 
me qui laboratis...Et aliud est de silvestri cacumine videre patriam 
pacis, et iter ad earn non invenire, et frustra conari per invia, circum 
obsidentibus et indsidiantibus fugitivis desertoribus cum principe 
suo leone et dracone: et aliud tenere viam illuc ducentem, cura 
ccelestis imperatoris munitam, ubi non latrocinantur qui coelestem 
militiam deseruerunt ; vitant enim earn sicut supplicium. 



250 LECTURE VIII. 

before and out of Christ, as these studies faithfully pursued 
must give us, will teach us that if there are sides on which 
heathen mythology stands related to, and has the recollec- 
tion and intimation of something higher than itself, there 
are also other sides upon which it lies under the influence of 
man's corruption, is itself the outgrowth of his foolish sin- 
darkened heart, with the impurities of its origin cleaving to 
it, — does itself help distinctly to mark his downward pro- 
gress toward idolatry, and toward the losing of the Creator 
in the creature, — is often only the strangely distorted resem- 
blance, never more than the faint prophecy, of the coming 
truth. And if so, we shall feel that to linger with that is 
ridiculous, whose only worth is that it hands on to some- 
thing better then itself, and is capable of being translated 
into a nobler language than its own. So too we shall feel 
that if the ancient philosophy had glorious ethical precepts, 
yet were they but adumbrations of the truth, since they 
wanted, for the most part, that body and substance which 
action alone could give them ; as is plain from unnumbered 
confessions and complaints on all sides heard, that the world's 
physicians had not healed themselves, much less their patients ; 
as is plainer still in the collossal character which sin had as- 
sumed,* till, at the time of Christ's appearing, it sat as it 
were incarnate, in the person of a Tiberius, on the throne of 
the world, f In all this we shall behold how feeble all the 

* In its two great aspects of lust and cruelty; the passages in 
proof of the first may remain unquoted; but what a picture of the 
last, this account of the gladiatorial games and of the manner in 
which they had grown ever bloodier, presents ! (Seneca, Ep. 7 :) 
Quidquid ante pugnatum est. misericordia fuit: nunc omissis nugis, 
niera homicidia sunt...Plagis aguntur in vulnera, et mutuos ictus 
nudis et obviis pectoribus excipiunt. Intermissum est spectaculum ? 
interim jugulantur homines, ne nihil agatur. 

| With only slight exaggeration Seneca compares the aspect of 
the world in which he was living to that of a city taken by storm 
(De Bene/., 1. 7, c. 27:) Si tibi vitee nostrae vera imago succurret. 



CONCLUDING LECTURE. 251 

barriers which the world's wisdom could raise up, to stay 
the overflowings of the world's ungodliness and evil.* 

But to imagine yet a third position ; we may read these 
hooks, not indeed setting them up in our affections against the 
truths which ought to be dearest to us, nor on the other 
hand slighting them, because not themselves Christian; but 
failing altogether to trace in them any relation at all to the 
great facts of the spiritual life of man. We may read them, 
forgetting that the meaning of books is to make us under- 
stand something else besides books, that we miss their sig- 
nificance to us, when they have their end in themselves, 
when they do not hand us on to life and to action; when 

videberis tibi videre captse cummaxime civitatis faciem, in qua 
omisso pudoris rectique respectu vires in consilio sunt, velut sigtio 
ad permiscenda omnia dato. Non igni non ferro abstinetur: soluta 
legibus scelera sunt, nee religio quidem, quae inter arma hostilia 
suppjices texit, ullum impedimentum est ruentiuminpraedam. Hie 
ex privato, hie ex publico, hie ex profano, hie sacro rapit: hie 
effringit, hie transilit : hie non contentus angusto itinere, ipsa qui- 
bus arcetur evertit, et in lucrum ruina venit. Hie sine csede popu- 
latur: Me spolia cruenta manu gestat: nemo non fert aliquid ex 
altero. Compare his 95th Epistle. 

* Thus the atrocity of the gladiatorial shows was by heathen 
moralists abundantly felt and understood. Cicero indeed makes 
but a feeble protest against them (Tusc. Qucest., 1. 2, c. 17 :) Cru- 
dele gladiatorum spectaculum et inhumanum non nullis viderisolet; 
et haud scio an ita sit, ut nunc fit. But Seneca more distinctly 
(Ep. 95:) Homo, sacra res, homo jam per lusum et jocum occiditur, 
et quem erudiri ad inferenda accipendaque vulnera nefas erat, is 
jam nudus inermisque producitur; satisque spectaculi in homine, 
mors est. Cf. Ep. 7. And Lucian, in a collection of the notable 
sayings of Demonax, a cynic philosopher of the second century, 
tells of him, that once when the Athenians were planning a specta- 
cle of the kind, he told them that they must overthrow the altar of 
Pity, before they proceeded further in this matter. Yet with all 
this it remained for an unlettered Christian monk to put a stop to 
these bloody shows. 



252 lecture virr. 

they explain to us no mysteries of our being, help us in no 
struggles of our souls, make clear to us no dealings of 
our God. 

There was a time in our lives, — yet a time which we who 
are here present should now have left behind us, — when 
tbis might have been natural enough, when it would have 
been premature to begin to meditate on the moral problems 
which these works present, or to do more than first to mas- 
ter their difficulties, and those overcome, to walk up and 
down admiring and enjoying the strange and wondrous world 
into which they had helped to introduce us. But the time 
is gone by, when that alone was our task. Further duties 
are ours — to study that classical antiquity in the light which 
our Christian faith and experience throw back upon it, with 
an open eye for its moral good and for its moral evil, with 
an entire confidence that in Christ and in his Gospel is 
given to us the touchstone which shall enable us to recog- 
nize — the sharp and dividing sword which shall enable us 
unerringly to separate between — the evil and the good, the 
false and the true. 

Let us feel that not by some strange inconsistency, some 
traditional usage which we will not abandon, but cannot 
defend, it has come to pass that a literature and philosophy, 
not Christian but heathen, hold the place which they do 
among us, members of the Church of Christ — are at this 
day contemplated, as they have been contemplated in time 
past, by each wiser and more thoughtful man, as an indis- 
pensable organ for all higher education, necessary instru- 
ments for the cultivating of the complete humanity.* Let 

* The intimate connexion between the Reformation and the revival 
of classical learning, with the zeal and success of the Reformers in 
promoting this last, all will remember — Melancthon's especially, to 
whom, beside other titles of honour, this of Prseceptor Germanise 
was added. There is a very interesting letter of Luther's in which 
thanking a friend, who had sent him a Latin Poem which he had 



CONCLUDING LECTURE. 253 

us feel that this only could have been, inasmuch as they 
stand in some real and intimate relation to the innermost 
fact of our lives, to our Christian hope — a relation of defect 
it will often be, yet a relation not the less, which should not 
be overlooked or denied. And these things being so, let us 
understand that we fall below our position, we fall short of 
the purpose with which these books were placed in our 
hands, when we fail to regard them in such a light as this. 
And in this light to look at them will not mar nor hinder 
that free spontaneous joy in them which in earlier times 
may have been ours. We may keep that earlier delight, 
and yet, keeping it, may pass on to a deeper and more medi- 
tative emotion. For indeed with what livelier interest shall 
we occupy onrselves with this classical antiquity, when we 
feel that it is not disconnected with the highest things of 
our life, the most solemn questions which can employ us as 
as baptized men. 

How many will be the thoughts and emotions, and all of 
them purifying and ennobling, which these studies in this 
spirit pursued, will awaken and cherish within us ! Thus 

composed, and had at the same time expressed his fears that the 
cause of classical literature would suffer from men's zeal about 
theology, Luther replies that it should not so with his consent: 
Ego persuasus sum, sine literarum peritia prorsus stare non posse 
sinceram theologiam, sicut hactenus ruentibus et jacentibus Uteris 
miserrime et cecidit et jacuit. Quin video nunquam fuisse insignem 
factam verbi Dei revelationem, nisi primd, velut prsecursoribus bap- 
tistis, viam pararit surgentibus et florentibus Unguis et Uteris. 
Plane nihil minus vellem fieri aut committi in juventute, quam ut 
poe'sin et rhetoricen omittant. In ca certe vota sum ut quam plu- 
rimi sint et poetse et rhetores, quod his studiis videam, sicut nee 
aliis modis fieri potest, mire aptos fieri homines ad sacra tarn capes- 
senda, quam dextre et feliciter tractanda...Quare et te oro ut etmeo 
(si quid valet) precatu agas apud vestram juventutem, ut strenueet 
poetentur et rhetoricentur. (Luther's Briefe, v. 2, p. 313. De 
Wette's edit.) 

22 



254 LECTURE VIII. 

surely a divine compassion will oftentimes stir in our hearts, 
as with an ear made open by love, we drink in the voices of 
the world's deep disquietude, its confessions of an intoler- 
able burden,* its acknowledgments that if there be nothing 
prouder, so also there is nothing more miserable, than man."}* 
And these we shall not go far without meeting : for how- 
ever the prevailing tone of that heathen world may be light- 
some and gay, a summons to enjoy the present to pluck the 

* In none perhaps so frequent and distinct as in Lucretius. There 
is a very interesting lecture in Keble's Prcelectiones, on the witness 
for and craving after that which Christianity only can give, that is 
to be found by those who know how to look for it, in the reputedly 
atheistic work of the great Roman poet. He dwells on the many 
passages in which he expresses his deep dissatisfaction with life, 
and with all which life could offer — a dissatisfaction which yet was 
not, like that of so many, on the score of the fleeting nature of life's 
pleasures and the little of them which a man in his brief space could 
enjoy — but had its rise rather in a sense that these very pleasures, 
even in fullest measure, did never truly fill the soul (Prcelect. 35:) 
Campus hie ferme nobilium est poetarum, ut neenias canat ac queri- 
nionias de vitse flore fragili ac caduco. Habet autem Lucretius nos- 
ter illud, ni fallor, proprium ac modo non singulare, quod non tarn 
breves et augustus incuset sevi in terris agendi limites, quam ipsum 
vitae hujus statuoi, vel optimse actae : significet, rem earn unicuique 
hominum et fuisse, et fore semper, molestissimo omnium oneri. 
This is but one of the many memorable passages of the kind, 3. 
1016: 

Deinde animi ingratam naturam pascere semper, 
Atque explere bonis rebus, satiareque nunquam, 
Quod faciunt nobis annorum tempora, circum 
Cum redeunt, foetusque ferunt, variosque labores, 
Nee tamen explemur vital fructibus unquam; 
Hoc, ut opinor, id est sevo florento puellas 
Quod memorant, laticem pertusum congrere in vas, 
Quod tamen expleri nulla ratione potestur. 
Compare 3. 1066—1097. 

f Pliny (H. N, 1. 2, c. 5:) Nee miserius quid quam homine, nee 
superbius. 



CONCLUDING LECTURE. 255 

roses of life ere they wither, yet if only we listen aright, we 
may detect that in its laughter there is heaviness ; and often- 
times that laughter is followed by a sigh drawn from deeps 
of the heart far deeper than those where its smiles were 
born.* Surely we shall find in these cries of a constant 
unrest, a thousand confirmations of his word, who, heathen 
as he was, yet likened man in his separation from Glod, to a 
child torn from its mother's arms, and which nowhere could 
be well, till it was given back to those arms once more."(" 

Again, as we acquaint ourselves with the lamentations of 
mourners for their dead, lamentations so deep and so despair- 
ing, as to explain to us all the meaning of that sorrowing 
without hope, which by the apostle is attributed to the 
heathen ;J as we hear too the wretched consolations of mise- 
rable comforters, the slight palliations of sharpest sorrows, 

* Compare Herodotus, 1. 7, c. 46 ; Iliad, 17. 446 ; Odyss., 18. 129 ; 
Lucretius, 5. 222; Moschus, Idyll., 3. 106; Sophocles, (Edipus Col., 
1225; Virgil, Georg., 3. 66. There is a striking collection of pas- 
sages in which the vanity, the sorrow, the burden of life, are 
acknowledged, in Plutarch's Consol. ad Apollon. 

f Dio Chrysostoni, Orat. 12, p. 405, ed. Reiske. 

| How affecting a picture does Augustine give of what his feel- 
ings were, when, in the time during which he was still moving in 
the element of heathen life, the friend of his soul was taken from 
him (Con/., 1. 4, c. 4:) Quo dolore contenebratum est cor meum; et 
quidquid aspiciebam, mors erat. Et erat mihi patria supplicium, et 
paterna domus mira infelicitas : et quidquid cum illo communica- 
veram, sine illo in cruciatum immanen verterat. Expetebant eum 
undique oculi mei, et non dabatur mihi; et oderam omnia, quia non 
haberent eum, nee mihi jam dicere poterant: Ecce veniet, sicut 
cum viverit quando absens erat. Factus eram ipse mihi magna 
quaestio, et interrogabam animam meam, quare tristis esset, et 
quare conturbaret me valde ; et nihil noverat respondere mihi. Et 
si dicebam: Spera in Deum, juste non obtemperabat; quia verior 
erat et melior homo quern carrissimum amiserat, quam phantasma 
in quod separare jubebatur. Solus fietus erat dulcis mihi, et suc- 
cesserat amico meo in deliciis animi mei. 



256 lecture vin. 

which were all that, with all their kindness, they could sug- 
gest, we shall know how to prize the oil and wine, the strong 
consolations which are stored in the Gospel for each bruised 
and smitten heart. 

Or a compassion profounder yet will stir within us, as the 
voices reach us, which proclaim that the very citadel of hope 
was lost, voices of an utter uncertainty about all things, and 
these coming from some of the earth's noblest spirits, who 
asked of themselves, and could give no satisfying answer to 
their own question, whether there was indeed a God govern- 
ing in righteousness,* or whether all was not given over to 
the blindest chance — whether they who did his will were a 
care to Him y whether they survived the grave, and if there 
were indeed any future and happy seats reserved for the 
names of the just. 

And even that of impure which we shall encounter, as we 
must encounter it, there, proving, as it often has done, fuel 
of dark fires in unholy hearts, setting them as with sparks 
of hell in a blaze, it shall not be us, who go not to seek it, who 
unwillingly encounter it, this incentive and provocative to 
evil. Rather shall this impure itself conspire to the same 
ends with all else which there we meet. It shall make us 
feel, in its light we shall more plainly see, what hideous sores 
there were to be healed, how deep a corruption to be sub- 
dued, when men could thus glory in their shame, and some 
comparatively pure in their lives, felt that in their works it 
was not merely so permitted, but so expected that they 

* The reader -will remember the way in -which the De NaturA 
Deorum concludes, and the entire indecision in which all is left. 
Pliny (H. N., 1. 2, c. 5) is more explicit yet in his open confession 
of an utter skepticism in any moral government of the world: Irri- 
dendum vero agere curam rerum humanarum illud quidquid est 
summum. Anne tarn tristii multiplicique ministerio non pollui cre- 
damus dubitemusve? Cf. Lucian's Jupiter Tragceedus, c. 17. 



CONCLUDING LECTURE. 257 

should write.* And intruding, as often that uuholy does, 
among the fairest creatures of genius, rising up like a plague- 
spot upon their foreheads, who were among the most gifted 
of their age and nation, it shall teach us a solemn lesson, 
even this — how much of moral insensibility may coexist with 
highest capacities of intellect — how little the sense of beauty 
by itself avails to preserve purity of heart, — how needful it 
is that hearts should be in better guardianship than this — 
how the highest of this earth's yields us no security against 
the lowest ; it shall teach us that if there are pinnacles of 
heaven above every man, and that in him which prompts 
him to ascend them, so also are there abysses of sensuality 
yawning beneath his feet, and that in him which tempts him 
to engulf himself in these. f 

* See the elder Pliny, Epist., 1. 4, ep. 14; 1. 5, ep. 3. 

f I borrow these remarkable words from the answer of one, whose 
position gave him full right to speak, to the proposal for publishing 
an expurgated edition of the classics for the use of schools. Rather, 
he says, he would have the works as the authors wrote them ; and 
encountering with his pupils any of those passages which, in such 
an edition, would have been omitted, he would make them the occa- 
sion of some such comment as the following: "This lesson they 
teach you, that refinement of intellect will not purify the heart ; 
that great mental endowments may co-exist with great moral insen- 
sibility : that vigour of understanding and delicacy of taste will 
not reform the world. You see that these have been tried and 
found wanting. Something more is needed. You may conclude 
also that the depravity of an age and country was great, in which 
those who were the most distinguished by their intellectual endow- 
ments and literary culture, thought themselves not only licensed, but 
expected thus to write. It follows that you have in these passages 
an evidence of the divine power and purity of that influence which 
did what all the wisdom of the world could never do. It is Chris- 
tianity, and it alone, which has really expurgated the literature, not 
only of Greece and Rome, but of the civilized world. These pas- 
sages are the trophies of the triumphs of Christianity. They show 
us, as in triumphal procession, what fearful enemies it has con- 

22* 



258 LECTURE VIII. 

Nor will this be all ; there will mingle in these studies 
thoughts and feelings of a liveliest thankfulness to God, as 
amid the great shipwreck of the Gentile world, we recognise 
the planks by which one and another attained, as we trust 
safely, and through the mercy of a Saviour whom as yet he 
did not know, to the shore of everlasting life — thankfulness 
mingled, it may oftentimes be, with something of a whole- 
some shame to ourselves, as we contemplate the faithfulness 
and fealty to the good and true, which even in the world's 
darkest hour have been shown by them, whose knowledge 
was so little, and whose advantages so few, as compared with 
our own. And perhaps it shall seem to us then, as if that 
Star in the natural heavens which guided those Eastern 
Sages from their distant home, was but the symbol of many 
a star which twinkled in the world's mystical night — but 
which yet, being faithfully followed, availed to lead humble 
and devout hearts from far off regions of superstition and 
error, till they knelt beside the cradle of the Babe of Bethle- 
hem, and saw all their weary wanderings repaid in a mo- 
ment, and all their desires finding a perfect fulfilment in 
Him. 

quered. Without them you might have asked what social good has 
the Gospel done ? "What moral blessings have we derived from it ? 
These passages forbid, they answer, those questions. They remind 
you from what, and into what you have been delivered, and by 
Whom. Therefore, had we expunged them, we should have dimin- 
ished the strength and glory of that very cause which we desire to 
serve. Being what they are, I fear not that you should pervert 
them to an improper use. God forbid that you should dwell on 
them with any other feelings than those of sorrow mingled with 
thankfulness. Horace, had he lived when you do, would have been 
a Christian, and had he been a Christian, he would not have writ- 
ten thus : but if you who are Christians, love to read, what he, had 
he been one, would have loathed to write, you, who ought to Chris- 
tianize him, heathenize yourselves." 

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